Empirical Earth · The Sky — Sun, Moon & Stars

The inverse-square law — why a local Sun fails

The claim

“The Sun is a small, local spotlight a few thousand kilometers up.”

What is measured

Light obeys 1/r² and apparent size obeys 1/r. A Sun a few thousand kilometers up would brighten, dim and change size across the day; the real Sun’s steady ~1,361 W/m² and ~0.5° width place it ~150 million km away. It is the same inverse-square geometry that governs gravity.

What would show this is wrong

a measured fall in the Sun’s intensity or apparent size from noon to late afternoon matching a source only a few thousand kilometers away.

Sources

  1. Inverse-square law & solar irradiance. Radiated intensity falls as 1/r²; solar irradiance is ~1,367 W/m² at 1 AU (Earth) versus ~9,126 W/m² at Mercury (0.387 AU) — the threefold-closer dista link
  2. The inverse-square law of light (NASA). Brightness decreases as the inverse square of distance because a fixed amount of light spreads over an area that grows as r²; the basis for the “stand link
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