• Question: What exactly is the closest distance to the sun that you can be without dying within a year?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      it’d depend on the planet you are on – we would die in a matter of weeks if we didn’t have a sufficient atmosphere here on earth because of the UV and other forms of radiation.
      also, if you were in a fantastically safe spaceship that could withstand very high temperatures and radiation then you could get pretty close.

      what people tend to ask is how far away from a star can we get liquid water. This is called the “Habitable Zone” or the “Goldilocks Region”, and a good picture for this is seen here :

      outside of this region it would be pretty tough to survive for long

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      As Aimee said, that’s determined by the inner boundary of the habitable zone of a star (which is just a fancy word for how close an Earth-like planet can be for water to be liquid on it, as opposed to in vapour form). In the case of our sun and the solar system, that’s about 75% of the radius of the orbit of the Earth. So this means 108 458 456 kilometres.

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      As the others have said, moving the Earth closer we wouldn’t be able too get too close, but in a space ship we’d be able to get much closer. The heat shields on NASA’s rockets are capable of withstanding something like 2000 K, still much less than the surface of the Sun, so we can’t get that far, but we could get much closer. The biggest factor would be the activity of the Sun, which launches coronal mass ejections like these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHWYtzcYYTM
      They would seriously affect how close you could get. And even then, you wouldn’t be able to stay for very long because the heat shields can’t deal with that temperature for very long, just for brief periods!

Comments