Equator to sun disltance, pole to sun distance?

Question

Equator to sun disltance, pole to sun distance?

Answer 1

For all intents and purposes - about the same.  It's like saying the how far is it from here to Halfway across the word and from one millimeter from here to halfway across the world.  The Sun is approx 149,600,000 kilometers from the Earth.

Between 146 million km (91 million miles) and 152 million km

(94.5 million miles) depending on Earth's position in orbit

Answer 2

For all practical purposes the same, as the other person said. In fact if you mean the surface of the sun, the error bar on where you define the surface to be (there really isn't one) is far greater than the 4,000 or so mile max difference twixt quator and pole.

Now, astronomers and astrophysicists use the center of the sun as the point of reference, and for orbital mechanical calculations, also use the center of the Earth.

What practical reason might we care? None, that I can see. The incoming radiation from the sun falls off as the square of the distance, so let's see, 93 million miles with a delta of about 4,000 miles that's about four thousandths of a percent difference, so the amount of radiation from the sun is not noticably different. Of course the reason the poles are cold is that the surface of the planet there is slanted to the incoming solar radiation so it is spread out over a larger area.