Wednesday, 8 September 2010

orbit - Is the ratio between earth's distance from the sun and the speed of light just a coincidence?

I was doing some calculations to see how hard it would be to observe the speed of light and discovered an interesting correlation between the speed of light and the average distance from the earth to the sun. In my example, an object would be placed in orbit around the sun so that its shadow would pass over the earth at the speed of light. After doing some math, I found that an object roughly 1 km above the sun, orbiting at 2 m/s would achieve this. I though that these numbers were a bit odd, so I took a closer look at the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s) and AU (149,597,871 km.) I found that 299,792,458 / 149,597,871 = 2 within a .2% degree of inaccuracy. To me, this seems too close to be chance. Is there an established relationship here, or is this just luck?

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