Speed of light question.?

Question

The suns light travels to Earth in 8 minutes. Then, according to my calculations, the suns light travels to Jupiter in 40 minutes. So.... my question is.... when i am looking up at the night sky with my naked eye at Jupiter is the spec of light 32 minutes old? Does it take 32 minutes for the light hitting jupiter to bounce off the planet and reflect back to Earth?

Answer 1

The planet jupiter does not need to be lit by the light from the sun for us to see it or detect it from earth. The light would take the number of minutes and seconds to travel from jupiter to earth that is an equivalence to the distance between the two at any given time, so it would vary depending on the variable distance caused by the orbital paths of the two planets