This consistent pattern prevents the two outermost planets of our solar system from ever becoming close enough to one another to produce an accident of astronomical proportions. The reason? For every three laps Neptune completes around the sun, Pluto only accomplishes two. Studies conducted by NASA have revealed that Pluto can, in fact, never collide with Neptune. If Neptune and Pluto are repeatedly crossing into one another’s orbits, you may be wondering how they have not yet bumped into each other. Though Pluto is the farthest planet from the Sun, due to its highly eccentric, elliptical orbit, its orbit occasionally crosses into the path of Neptune’s orbit, effectively taking Neptune’s place as the eighth planet from the Sun for 20 years out of every 248 years (when measured in Earth years). Pluto’s elongated path around the Sun mimics the shape of an oval. – At Aphelion (the point at which Neptune is at its farthest position from the Sun), the distance between the Sun and Neptune equals 2,824.6 million miles (4,545.7 million km), making it so that the sunlight requires 15,163 seconds ( 4 hours, 12 minutes, and 43 Seconds) to reach Neptune’s surface.īut, no matter where Neptune is in its orbit, sunlight requires a relatively long time to reach it: while it takes 4 hours, 7 minutes, and 6 seconds to 4 hours, 12 minutes, and 43 seconds for sunlight to reach the surface of Neptune, depending on its position relative to the Sun, in contrast, it only takes an average of 8 minutes and 20 seconds for sunlight to reach the surface of our home planet: Earth.ĭwarf planet Pluto’s orbit has a high level of eccentricity, meaning that its orbit significantly deviates from a perfectly circular one.
– At Perihelion (the point at which Neptune is at its closest position to the Sun), the distance between the Sun and Neptune equals 2,761.7 million miles (4,444.5 million km), making it so that sunlight requires 14,826 seconds ( 4 hours, 7 minutes, and 6 Seconds) to reach Neptune’s surface. Moving at a speed of 0.186 million miles/s (0.3 million km/s), sunlight needs an average of 14,995 seconds, or 4 hours, 9 minutes, and 55 Seconds, to reach Neptune. Neptune's equatorial radius of 24,764 km is nearly four times that of Earth. Its gravity at 1 bar is 11.15 m/s 2, 1.14 times the surface gravity of Earth, and surpassed only by Jupiter.
Neptune is located 2,793 million miles (4,495.1 million km) away from the Sun (on average). Neptune's mass of 1.0243 × 10 26 kg is intermediate between Earth and the larger gas giants: it is 17 times that of Earth but just 1/19th that of Jupiter.