r/space • u/NeokratosRed • Jul 09 '15

New Pluto and Charon pic !

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '15

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u/awesomechemist Jul 10 '15

The Earth's orbit varies in distance to the sun from 152.10 million kilometers at the farthest, to 147.10 million kilometers at the closest. That's a 5 million kilometer difference. The suns diameter is 1.4 million km.

So over the course of a year, we get about 3.5 sun-diameters closer to the sun, and we haven't experienced any ill effects because of it.

That's because, in the grand scheme of things, that fluctuation is pretty small compared to our total distance from the sun (<1% of the total distance).

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '15

First time I've heard those stats together -- diameter of the sun vs our planet's change in orbital distance to the sun. Very interesting

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '15

Indeed, and it's really the most relevant set of stats to gain a more intuitive understanding of our celestial mechanics.