How long is a day on the sun?
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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
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