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How long is a day on the sun? At first might seem like a stupid question.
A day is how long it takes the sun to come back overhead.
Doesn’t happen on the sun, unless you’re standing upside down, in which case days on the sun are infinitesimally short and your hair is on fire.
But maybe a day is how long it takes to spin around relative to the distant stars, in which case different parts of the sun have different days because it’s a big ball of flowing, gassy plasma and different parts rotate at different rates: relative to distant stars, the sun’s equator rotates once every 24 and a half earth days, while near its poles it rotates roughly every 34 earth days.
Or maybe a day is simply 86400 seconds, in which case a day on the sun is slightly longer than a day on the earth due to gravitational time dilation.
Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute!
Created by Henry Reich
It's always Sunday though.
How long is a night on the sun?
"At first, it might sound like a stupid question...but when we delve deeper and think about it from multiple perspectives, it actually makes no sense..."
A day is the lower bound on time to build Rome
if a day is from sunrise to sunset then it would be the length of the life of the star.
Bro just wanted to use the yellow highlighter ☀️
But what happens if you stand on your head on the sun at night.... 😆
In space, it's almost always daytime (just not when you're behind the earth)
A day on the sun is the amount of time it takes to become a burned bacon crisp.
You know the sun isn’t the centre of the solar system. It’s a black hole, but in our place, the sun isn’t perfectly centered. Jupiter pulls it so it is off by a little.
You can say something about time dilation without saying in whose reference. A day on the suns “surface” is a day on the suns “surface”. Period.
If you stand on the sun and look up, will you see darkness?
Me when I rub my cheek on an aperture science hard light bridge
Good scifi includes the length of time a distant planet takes when orbiting it's own axis or the time per season. So many shows and books presume it's earth standard.
We defined day and night RELATIVE TO our sun. Now we are defining day ON THE relation point (or origin, whatever)
in ukranian language we have separete words for day as part with light and day as for 24 h - день
It's actually really cool that only sidereal days are possible on the surface of the sun.
Come to think of it, minutephysics started out as "short" content
wait i'm actually questioning now if a day is based on how long it takes for a point on the earth to face the sun again or for the earth to physically rotate 360° wow uh thx for the replies, this is insightful :)
I'm team "Average Sidereal Day", as in, the median between the longest and shortest sidereal days