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Pluto has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit, ranging from 30 to 49 astronomical units (4.5 to 7.3 billion kilometres; 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles) from the Sun. Light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its orbital distance of 39.5 AU (5.91 billion km; 3.67 billion mi).
From the planetary frame of reference, the ship's speed will appear to be limited by the speed of light — it can approach the speed of light, but never reach it. If a ship is using 1 g constant acceleration, it will appear to get near the speed of light in about a year, and have traveled about half a light year in distance. For the middle of ...
A light-year is the distance light travels in one Julian year, around 9461 billion kilometres, 5879 billion miles, or 0.3066 parsecs. In round figures, a light year is nearly 10 trillion kilometres or nearly 6 trillion miles. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth after the Sun, is around 4.2 light-years away. [89]
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Pluto was always in a tough spot when it came to being a planet. Just 1,477 miles across, it's only one-fifth the diameter of Earth. It did have five known moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and ...
A light-minute is 60 light-seconds, and so the average distance between Earth and the Sun is 8.317 light-minutes. The average distance between Pluto and the Sun (34.72 AU [5]) is 4.81 light-hours. [6] Humanity's most distant artificial object, Voyager 1, has an interstellar velocity of 3.57 AU per year, [7] or 29.7 light-minutes per year. [8]
Consider a space ship traveling from Earth to the nearest star system: a distance d = 4 light years away, at a speed v = 0.8c (i.e., 80% of the speed of light). To make the numbers easy, the ship is assumed to attain full speed in a negligible time upon departure (even though it would actually take about 9 months accelerating at 1 g to get up ...
At Pluto's distance, radio signals from the space probe back to Earth took four hours and 25 minutes to traverse 4.7 billion km of space. [ 68 ] Part of the reason for the delay between the gathering of and transmission of data is that all of the New Horizons instrumentation is body-mounted.