The sun is 93,000,000 miles or 1.5 x 1011 meters; that is 150,000,000,000 meters far from Earth. Now, a football field (American football, not soccer) is about 100 meters.

In short, the sun is 92.96 million miles away. That’s 149.6 kilometers, 490.8 billion feet, or 5.89 trillion inches! All of those things can be converted to one simple term: 1 AU. An AU is an astronomical unit, a term scientists came up with to simplify distances within our solar system. An AU is the average distance from Earth to the sun. The distance from Earth to the sun actually changes throughout the year. The Earth’s orbit around the sun is not a perfect circle, but rather an oval, so at some times it can be as high as 94 million miles, and at others it can be as short as 91 million miles. This is really far away. This is why light takes so much time to get to us from the sun. If the sun ever went out or disappeared, we wouldn’t even know for 8 minutes!

I really like this question because it has existed ever since people were capable of thought. It is so natural to have questions about that massive ball in the sky. If you assume it’s big, then it must be ridiculously far away. So how far away is the sun? The sun is approximately ninety-three million miles away. That number is almost too big to really understand so let’s think about it for a bit. The distance to the sun is almost four thousand times bigger than the circumference of the earth! If you were traveling in a rocket at sixty miles per hour (the speed of most cars on a freeway) it would take one hundred and seventy-seven years to get to the sun. That’s a long time! It really makes you think about how large and far away objects are in the solar system. Thank you for the question!

The Sun is about 150 billion meters (or 93 million miles) away from the earth. It will take a bit more than eight minutes for the light to travel from the sun to the earth.

The sun is eight light minutes (150 million kilometers) away.