How Far Away Is The Sun?

Our sun looks so much brighter and bigger than other stars simply because it is the nearest one to the earth. The sun's average distance from the earth is nearly 93,000,000 miles (149,637,000 kilometres). Light reaches the earth from the sun in about 8-1/3 minutes. Since the sun is the centre of the solar system, the earth and all its sister planets move in great circles around it.
Moving at a tremendous speed, the sun travels through space at about twelve miles a second. Yet there is no danger that our sun will travel too close to another star. The nearest star, called Proxima Centauri, is more than 25,000,000,000,000 miles (40,225,000,000,000 kilometres) away. So far away is it that it takes light, travelling at more than 186,000 miles a second, over four years to get from that star to our earth. If the earth were travelling in the direction of Proxima Centauri, it would take nearly 65,000 years to reach it.

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