How far is the Earth from the Sun, the Moon and all the other planets? How far are all of the planets from the Sun? Do you know of a software that tracks the planets in real-time?
Down below the image produced, you'll see the distance from the Sun, the Moon and all of the planets to Earth. It's given in the measure of an A.U. (Astronomical Unit) .. http://www.windows2universe.org/space_missions/au.html .. (except for the Moon's distance to Earth which is given in the measure of Earth radius where one Earth radius is 6,376.5 kilometers).
So, let's take an example. It says that today Saturn is 8.833 A.U. away from Earth. To get that distance in kilometers, multiply the A.U. distance by 149,600,000. To get that distance in miles, multiply the A.U. distance by 93,000,000. So Saturn is 1,321,416,800 kilometers from Earth (8.833x149,600,000) and 821,190,000 miles from Earth today (8.833x93,000,000). The same set of calculations can be done for all of the planets.
The minimum and maximum distance of the planets from the Sun is given on their planetary facts pages: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
Submitted by Robert (age 14, Maine, USA), Erin (age 16, Michigan, USA), Randy, Kate (age 12, England), Miss Holts' elementary classroom, Lorna (age 10, England), Tara (age 17, Georgia, USA), Colleen (age 14, Colorado, USA), Edith (age 32, Virginia, USA) (January 30, 2001)
Last modified January 31, 2001 by Jennifer Bergman.
L. Calcada/AP - This artist’s impression made available by the European Southern Observatory on Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2012 shows a planet, right, orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B, center, a member of the triple star system that is the closest to Earth. Alpha Centauri A is at left.
By Brian Vastag, Published: October 17
A star nearly next door to our sun — in galactic terms — is home to a hot little planet about the same size as Earth, scientists announced Tuesday.
This overheated world hugs the star Alpha Centauri B, zipping around it every three days.
It’s the nearest so-called exoplanet yet discovered. The planet’s Earth-like size and orbit around a sunlike star make it a “landmark discovery,” said Stephane Udry of the University of Geneva, leader of the research team.
“This is in our back yard,” said Gregory Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a member of a rival team also searching the Alpha Centauri system for planets.
Alpha Centauri B is slightly smaller, dimmer and more yellow than our sun. The new planet, dubbed Alpha Centauri Bb, is much closer to that star than Mercury is to our sun.
Alpha Centauri B is visible only from the Southern Hemisphere, so the research team studied it with instruments at the European Southern Observatory .. http://www.eso.org/public/ .. in Chile.
They detected the planet indirectly, by seeing Alpha Centauri B wobble at a speed of about one mile per hour — a sign of a small planet tugging on it.
Detecting it was tricky, requiring 450 nights of observation over four years.
The new planet’s Earth-like mass marks it as a rocky body, not a gas planet like Jupiter, said Xavier Dumusque, a University of Geneva astronomer and the lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature describing the find.
Dumusque said it’s likely that the planet’s surface “is not solid but more like lava — like a ‘lava planet.’ ”
One expert said the finding needs to be confirmed. “Only if other analyses come to the same conclusion can we be sure that this planet exists,” astronomer Artie Hatzes wrote in a companion article in Nature.
Udry, in response, said there is less than one chance in 1,000 that the discovery is a phantom of the team’s data.
As the closest stars to our sun, some four light-years distant, the Alpha Centauri system has long intrigued astronomers. Unlike our solar system, the system contains three stars locked in a gravitational dance.
In the 1990s, astronomers listened to the Alpha Centauri system for alien radio broadcasts but heard nothing, said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute .. http://www.seti.org/ .. in California. Any aliens on the new planet “would have to be devilish and enjoy hot weather,” he said, adding that the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project will probably take another listen across a broader range of radio channels in case other, more habitable planets also lurk in the system.
Since 1995, astronomers have listed 842 planets around other stars, according to one catalogue .. http://exoplanet.eu/ , revealing that most stars have planets. They’ve discovered a likely “diamond” planet, possible ocean worlds and huge, Jupiter-like behemoths too hot to sustain any conceivable life.
They have yet to find their biggest quarry, an “Earth 2.0” — an Earth-size planet orbiting a sunlike star at just the right distance for liquid water.
Sunday's Solar Eclipse To Be Rare, Dramatic 'Hybrid' Event 'Highly Commended' by the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013, this amazing space wallpaper is a composite shot showing the progress of an annular eclipse in May 2013. This overview map of the Nov. 3, 2013 annular and total solar eclipse, a hybrid solar eclipse, shows the path of the event. 11/02/2013 A slice of eastern North America will undergo a weird and dramatic event early Sunday (Nov. 3) morning: a partial eclipse of the sun. For most North American observers, the partial eclipse [ http://www.space.com/23414-dramatic-solar-eclipse-east-coast-sunday.html ] will coincide with sunrise. But within a very narrow corridor that extends for 8,345 miles (13,430 kilometers) across the planet, the disks of the sun and the moon will appear to exactly coincide, providing an example of the most unusual type of eclipse: a "hybrid" or "annular-total eclipse." During annular solar eclipse, the sun looks like a "ring of fire," while the moon and sun line up perfectly during a total eclipse. Throughout a hybrid eclipse, however, the celestial sight transitions from annular to total. [Photos: Nov. 3 Hybrid Solar Eclipse Visibility Maps & Images [ http://www.space.com/23419-hybrid-solar-eclipse-visibility-images-november-3-2013.html ]] If you don't have a chance to see the eclipse from your part of the world, you can watch the cosmic rarity live on SPACE.com [ http://www.space.com/19195-night-sky-planets-asteroids-webcasts.html ] courtesy of the online community observatory Slooh.com [ http://live.slooh.com/ ; live feed (currently running in 'Please stand by' mode with a bit over 8 hours to go) "Total Solar Eclipse - 11/3/2013", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJPhI6QcxPo (next below)].
The eclipse event begins at 6:45 a.m. EST (1515 GMT) and will run throughout the entirety of the eclipse. A Rare Occurrence During the 21st century approximately 4.9 percent of all central solar eclipses — those eclipses where the moon crosses directly in front of the disk of the sun — fall into the hybrid classification. In most cases, an annular-total eclipse starts as an annular, or "ring of fire" [ http://www.space.com/21080-ring-of-fire-solar-eclipse-photos.html ] eclipse, because the tip of the moon's dark shadow cone — the umbra — falls just short of making contact with the Earth; so the moon appears slightly smaller than the sun producing the same effect as placing a penny atop a nickel leaving a ring of sunlight shining around the moon's edge. Then the solar eclipse [ http://www.space.com/15584-solar-eclipses.html ] transitions to total, because the roundness of the Earth reaches up and intercepts the shadow tip near the middle of the path, then finally it reverts back to annular toward the end of the path. However, as pointed out by the renowned Belgian eclipse calculator, Jean Meeus, the hybrid eclipse of Nov. 3 will be a special case: here the eclipse starts out as annular, then after only 15-seconds it will transition to a total eclipse, and then it remains total up to the very end of the eclipse path. The last time this happened was on Nov. 20, 1854 and the next such case after 2013 will occur on Oct. 17, 2172. [...] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/02/sunday-solar-eclipse-rare-hybrid_n_4202543.html [with comments]; original at http://www.space.com/23442-rare-hybrid-solar-eclipse-explained.html [with embedded videos, and comments]
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NASA | Five Days of Flares and CMEs
Published on Oct 29, 2013 by NASA Goddard
This movie shows 23 of the 26 M- and X-class flares on the sun between 1800 UT Oct. 23 and 1500 UT Oct. 28, 2013, as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. It also shows the coronal mass ejections -- great clouds of solar material bursting off the sun into space -- during that time as captured by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. Music: "Stella Nova" by Lars Leonhard, courtesy of the artist and Ultimae records. http://www.lars-leonhard.de / http://www.ultimae.com
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