Question

How many minutes is required for sunlight to travel from the sun to earth? (assume the sun is 93,000,000 miles from earth and that sunlight travels at 1.86 × 105 miles per second.)?

Answer 1

To determine the time it takes for the sunlight to travel from the sun to earth, we need to have information of the speed of the light and the distance from the sun to the earth. If we have these, we can simply divide the distance by the speed to obtain the time. We do as follows:

time = distance / speed
time = 93,000,000 miles / 1.86 × 10^5 miles per second
time = 500 seconds

We have to convert it to minutes since it is asked.

time = 500 seconds ( 1 minute / 60 seconds ) = 8.33 minutes.

Therefore, the time it takes for sunlight to travel from the sun to the earth would be about 8.33 minutes.