How Far Is Uranus From The Sun?
QUICK ANSWER
Uranus orbits an average of 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion km) from the Sun, about 19 times Earth's distance. A single year on Uranus takes about 84 Earth years to complete. Sunlight takes roughly 2 hours and 40 minutes to reach Uranus, compared to just 8 minutes for Earth.
Uranus sits nearly 2 billion miles from the Sun, far enough that sunlight takes well over two hours to get there. At this distance, the Sun looks like a very bright star rather than a disk in the sky. Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun, the second-farthest of the four giant planets, and a long way from anything else.
What is Uranus's distance from the Sun?
According to NASA, Uranus orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 1.8 billion miles (2.87 billion km), or 19.2 astronomical units (AU). For reference, 1 AU is Earth's distance from the Sun. Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun, sitting between Saturn (9.5 AU) and Neptune (30 AU). The distance is so vast that Uranus is invisible to most people without telescopes, even though it's technically visible to the naked eye under perfect dark-sky conditions.
How long does Uranus take to orbit the Sun?
About 84 Earth years. Uranus moves slowly through space, both because of its great distance from the Sun and because the Sun's gravity is much weaker at that range. Uranus travels at about 15,000 mph on average through its orbit, much slower than Earth's 67,000 mph. The 84-year orbit means that in an average human lifetime, Uranus completes less than one full trip around the Sun. Most people will see Uranus pass through only one or two of its long seasons in their lifetime.
How far is Uranus from Earth?
It varies between about 1.6 billion and 2.0 billion miles, depending on where each planet is in its orbit. The distance never gets dramatically closer to Earth even at the best alignments, because both planets are always so far apart. Light from Uranus takes about 2 hours and 40 minutes to reach Earth on average, meaning when astronomers observe Uranus, they're seeing the planet as it appeared more than two hours earlier. Radio signals from Voyager 2, the last spacecraft to visit Uranus, took similarly long to reach Earth.
How much sunlight does Uranus get?
Very little. The amount of sunlight per square mile drops with the square of distance from the Sun, so at Uranus's distance (about 19 times Earth's), sunlight is only about 1/360th as intense as at Earth's distance. The Sun would still appear as a brilliantly bright point of light from Uranus, much brighter than any star, but it wouldn't fill the sky like it does for us. There would be no warmth in any meaningful sense; Uranus's surface temperatures stay around -300°F regardless of where you are on the planet.
Uranus orbits 1.8 billion miles from the Sun, with a year stretching 84 Earth years and sunlight intensity less than 1 percent of what Earth receives. It's the second-farthest of the four giant planets, deep in the cold outer solar system. The distance is part of what makes Uranus so understudied; only one spacecraft has ever visited, and it was a brief flyby almost 40 years ago.
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