Science & history · Our star
How far away is the Sun today?
Earth's orbit is not quite a circle, so the distance to the Sun changes by about five million kilometres over a year.
Today's distance and light time
Worked out in your browser for today's date.
The average and the range
The Sun is about 150 million kilometres away on average. Earth is closest in early January and farthest in early July, the opposite of what many people expect, because distance is not what causes the seasons.
The page works out today's distance from the same calculation that times your sunrise (how these pages calculate), and divides it by the speed of light, 299,792.458 km/s, for how long today's sunlight has been travelling.
What the light time is not
Light leaving the Sun now arrives a little over eight minutes later. That is a propagation time for light; it is not a warning time for space weather. A coronal mass ejection is a cloud of material, not light, and takes from about 15 hours to several days.
Sources
- NASA Sun: Facts (opens in a new tab) for age, size, distance, temperatures, layers, rotation, cycle, type, future · checked 2 October 2026
- NASA Space Place What Causes the Seasons? (opens in a new tab) for tilt, not distance; perihelion in January · checked 2 October 2026
- Cool Moon Facts How the Sun pages calculate for the engine, its definitions, its independent checks and its limits
- NASA Solar Storms and Flares (opens in a new tab) for flares (light, ~8 minutes), CMEs (15 hours to days), particle storms (~30 minutes), effects · checked 2 October 2026