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Last Post 3/23/2020 11:47 AM by  Kris Sigsbee
SUN'S TIME
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3/23/2020 9:58 AM
    If some one was to live on the Sun would it be the same time on Earth as it is on the Sun?Also how far apart is the Sun's time from Eart if the time is diffrent?

    Kris Sigsbee



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    3/23/2020 11:47 AM
    Hello!

    If you watch Doctor Who, you've probably heard that time is "a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff." If you have read about Albert Einstein, you've probably also heard that time is relative. So this is actually a complicated question to answer!

    There are different ways of measuring time here on Earth, but the ways most people are familiar with in their everyday lives depend upon the Earth's rotation on it's axis and it's orbit around the Sun. Here on Earth, we define one day as roughly the time it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis, which amounts to 24 hours, and is equivalent to 1440 minutes or 86400 seconds. A year is the time it takes the Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun and is about 365 days, or 366 days in a leap year like 2020. If you have seen the musical "Rent" you probably know that there are 525,600 minutes in a 365 day year based upon a 24-hour Earth day.

    So let's talk about how long a day would be on the Sun, or the time it takes the Sun to rotate once on its axis. This is a bit tricky, since the Sun rotates faster at its equator than at its poles. This differential rotation occurs because the Sun is made of plasma and is not a solid body. In a frame of reference defined by the stars, the rotational period of the Sun is approximately 25.6 days at the equator and 33.5 days at the poles. Viewed from the Earth as it orbits the Sun, the rotational period of the Sun at its equator looks like it is about 28 days. So we could say that one "day" on the Sun is about 28 Earth days.

    Since the Sun can't orbit around itself, we need a different way to think about what a "year" would be for the Sun. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, so we could define a galactic year as the amount of time required for the Sun to orbit once around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Estimates of the length of time it would take for the Sun to complete one orbit around the center of our galaxy range from 225 to 250 million Earth years.

    Kris
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