Solar System Au Distances

Distances in the solar system are commonly measured in astronomical units.

Solar system au distances.

Astronomical units light years and parsecs. Astronomical unit a unit of length effectively equal to the average or mean distance between earth and the sun defined as 149 597 870 7 km 92 955 807 3 miles. The distances are expressed in astronomical units abbreviated as au. The actual distance varies as earth orbits the sun from a maximum to a minimum and back again once each year the au was originally conceived as the average of earth s aphelion and perihelion.

1 au is the distance from the sun to earth which is 149 600 000 km. One au is the distance from the sun to the earth which is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. However since 2012 it has been. Figures 1 and 3 illustrate locations of various objects in the solar system and their distances from the sun.

Today my focus is to show the distances between them. Let me explain a bit more about those. The scale bar is in astronomical units with each set distance beyond 1 au representing 10 times the previous distance. Because the earth s orbit around the sun is an ellipse the earth is not always the same distance from the sun.

Astronomers use the distance between earth and sun which is 93 million miles as a new unit of measure called the astronomical unit. The astronomical unit provides a convenient way to express and relate distances of objects in the solar system and to carry out astronomical calculations. The table below shows the eight planets and the average distance between them. Astronomers like to list the distances to objects within our solar system planets dwarf planets asteroids comets spacecraft etc in terms of the astronomical unit or au.

An au is simply the average distance between the earth and the sun. There is a huge amount of different in the distances between the planets depending on their position on their orbit path. This artist s concept puts solar system distances in perspective. One au is the distance from the sun to earth s orbit which is about 93 million miles 150 million kilometers.

So for cosmic distances we switch to whole other types of units. Astronomical units abbreviated au are a useful unit of measure within our solar system. Problem 1 the table below gives the distance from the sun of the eight planets in our solar system. One astronomical unit is the approximate distance from earth to the sun.

The solar system is the gravitationally bound system of the sun and the objects that orbit it either directly or indirectly. The astronomical unit symbol. The au column is the distance in astronomical units. It is defined to be exactly 1 00 for the earth sun orbit distance and we call this distance 1 00 aus.