Contrary to online claims, the earth is 93 million miles from the sun, is not flat and there is plenty of night-time footage of the planet taken from space, experts told Reuters.
A Facebook video viewed more than 64,000 times at this fact check’s time of writing asks “DID NASA LIE ABOUT THE SUN?” and includes various clips intended as proof that the earth is flat (here). The video originates from TikTok (here).
In a little less than five minutes, the video says that the earth is the center of our universe and that the sun spins around the earth and is not 93 million miles away. It also says the earth is flat and questions why clouds can’t be seen in nighttime images of the earth taken from space.
Reuters has previously debunked false claims of a flat earth (here), (here) and (here).
The sun is at least 91.4 million miles and at most 94.5 million miles away from earth, making the average distance about 93 million miles depending on the time of year, NASA says (here).
The first accurate distance between the sun and the earth was estimated hundreds of years ago in 1672 by Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Alex Young, an associate director at NASA’s Heliophysics Science Division, told Reuters.
The distance between the sun and earth can be calculated using the parallax technique, described in more detail by experts at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Cornell University (here), (here).
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