• Question: How long would it take to walk round the sun?

    Asked by Ellis to Lisa, Mark, Rachel, Sammie, Stephen, Tim on 5 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Lisa Baddeley

      Lisa Baddeley answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      A quick ‘back of envelope’ calculation. I’ll assume we’ll walk around the Sun’s equator. The distance we’d walk would be the circumference of the Sun at the equator. If the radius of the Sun at the equator is 700,000km, then it’s circumference is 4.4 million km (since the circumference of a circle is 2*pi*radius). The average human has a walking speed of 5km/hr so it would take about 100 years to walk around the Sun.

    • Photo: Tim Duckenfield

      Tim Duckenfield answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      Like Lisa says, a very long time! You can cheat a little bit though – the Sun is rotating, just like the Earth. The Sun rotates in a bit more unusual way than the Earth though, because different latitudes* spin at different speeds. The equator spins fastest, and the poles the slowest. So walking along the equator might seem like you were walking quicker than if you were further north or south, because that part spins faster! Weird huh?

      *Latitude means how far North/South from the equator you are, so the North Pole has the biggest latitude at 90 degrees N, and the UK just over halfway up at 52 degrees N.

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