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This is because the distance between Earth and the Sun is not fixed (it varies between 0.983 289 8912 and 1.016 710 3335 au) and, when Earth is closer to the Sun , the Sun's gravitational field is stronger and Earth is moving faster along its orbital path. As the metre is defined in terms of the second and the speed of light is constant for all ...
16.6 Tm – 111.2 AU – distance to Voyager 2 as of May 2016; 18 Tm – 123.5 AU – distance between the Sun to the farthest dwarf planet in the Solar System, the Farout 2018 VG18; 20.0 Tm – 135 AU – distance to Voyager 1 as of May 2016; 20.6 Tm – 138 AU – distance to Voyager 1 as of late February 2017
It communicates through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. Real-time distance and velocity data are provided by NASA and JPL. [4] At a distance of 166.28 AU (24.9 billion km; 15.5 billion mi) from Earth as of December 2024, [4] it is the most distant human-made object from Earth. [5]
The instantaneous distance varies by about ± 2.5 million kilometres (1.6 million miles) as Earth moves from perihelion around 3 January to aphelion around 4 July. [36] At its average distance, light travels from the Sun's horizon to Earth's horizon in about 8 minutes and 20 seconds, [ 37 ] while light from the closest points of the Sun and ...
Proxima Centauri b is the closest exoplanet to Earth, [20] at a distance of about 4.2 ly (1.3 parsecs). [5] It orbits Proxima Centauri every 11.186 Earth days at a distance of about 0.049 AU, [1] over 20 times closer to Proxima Centauri than Earth is to the Sun. [21] As of 2021, it is unclear whether it has an eccentricity [e] [24] but Proxima Centauri b is unlikely to have any obliquity. [25]
The largest unit for expressing distances across space at that time was the astronomical unit, equal to the radius of the Earth's orbit at 150 million kilometres (93 million miles). In those terms, trigonometric calculations based on 61 Cygni's parallax of 0.314 arcseconds, showed the distance to the star to be 660 000 astronomical units (9.9 ...
The astronomical unit of length is now defined as exactly 149 597 870 700 meters. [4] It is approximately equal to the mean Earth–Sun distance. It was formerly defined as that length for which the Gaussian gravitational constant (k) takes the value 0.017 202 098 95 when the units of measurement are the astronomical units of length, mass and ...
At a distance of 26,000 light-years (8,000 parsecs), this yields a diameter of 51.8 million kilometres (32.2 million miles). [a] For comparison, Earth is 150 million kilometres (1.0 astronomical unit; 93 million miles) from the Sun, and Mercury is 46 million km (0.31 AU; 29 million mi) from the Sun at perihelion.