Chemistry Problem

Question

Earth is approximately 1.5 x 10^8 km from the sun. How many minutes does it take light to travel from the sun to Earth? The speed of light is 3.0 x 10^8 m/s

Answer 1

Taking the speed of light to be approximately 3x10⁸ m/s and converting 1.5x10⁸ km to meters, we can solve this using dimensional analysis:

1.5x10⁸ km x 1x10³ m/km x 1 sec/3x10⁸ m = 500 seconds x 1 minute/60 seconds = 8.3 minutes