Is There a 'geo-stationary' Orbit Around the Sun?

is there any satellite which stays at a single point with respect to the sun ?????
- mahesh (age 21)
mehsana,gujarat,india

Hello Hahesh,

Yes there is but unfortunately it is almost the same distance as the radius the sun.   It would burn up in a flash.

Kepler's third law states: 'The square of the period of any planet is proportional to the cube of the semimajor axis of its orbit' .  The period of the earth is 365 days.   Its distance to the sun is 1 AU  or about 150 million km.The sun rotates, at its equator, once every 25 days.  That gives the solar-centric distance equal to the earth-sun distance times (25/365)^2/3 *AU, about 6.8 million km.    That is the same as the radius of the sun.  

LeeH

Another possilbility is that you were asking about whether a satellite could keep the same position relative to the Sun and Earth. The places for the satellite where that can happen are called the stable Lagrange points, and are described in a Wikipedia article: .

Mike W.

(published on 11/09/2015)