Neptune: The Farthest Planet from Earth in the Solar System

KOMPAS.com – We know that there are 8 planets in the Solar System, namely Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Of these planets, which is farthest from Earth?

The farthest planet from Earth

Neptune is the most distant planet from the Sun and the farthest planet from Earth.

At an average distance of 4.5 billion kilometers, Neptune is 30 astronomical units from the Sun. One astronomical unit (abbreviated AU), is the distance from the Sun to the Earth.

With this distance, sunlight needs to travel 4 hours to reach Neptune.

Also read: Neptune Isn’t As Blue As Thought, New Images Of The Planet Prove It

Meanwhile, Neptune is 4.3 billion km from Earth. At its farthest distance, Neptune can reach around 4.7 billion km from Earth. This occurs when the planets are on different sides of the Sun from each other.

So, what about Pluto? Isn’t Pluto the farthest planet from Earth?

This happens at least most of the time. The reason is, Pluto’s orbit intersects with Neptune’s orbit, and for 20 years of Pluto’s 248 year orbit, Neptune is actually farther away from Pluto.

However, in 2006, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. However, nothing has changed about Pluto, only the definition of the planet has been rewritten.

So, in the Solar System, Neptune is the farthest planet from Earth, but exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, are also known to exist.

Also read: What are the surface conditions of the Red Planet like?

With the first confirmed detections in the mid-1990s, thousands of exoplanets have been identified, with the most distant being found in the central bulge of the Milky Way Galaxy, some 27,000 light years away.

In 2022, NASA announced that a search of the Kepler space telescope data archive had revealed K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, an exoplanet 17,000 miles from Earth and the most distant planet ever discovered by Kepler.

Data from increasingly sophisticated telescopes shows that exoplanets are common and likely exist at greater distances, perhaps beyond the Milky Way Galaxy or at the very edge of the Universe.

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2024-01-14 10:52:00
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