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The energy of the light received by the Earth from the sun is called insolation. The average solar radiation arriving at the top of the Earth's atmosphere is roughly 1,366 watts per square meter By the time this energy has reached Earth's surface it is reduced to about 1,000 watts per square meter.

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12y ago
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16y ago

About 5x10-27 percent. How is this so? Given: the radius of your eye is 0.75 mm (in bright light) the distance of your eye to the sun is one AU, this is 149,597,870,697 meter The surface of your eye's pupil is 1.767x10-6 m2 Your eye is on a sphere with radius 1 AU; the surface of this sphere is 7.03x1022 m2 Let's assume that the sun's light is evenly distributed over this sphere. The ratio of the surfaces of your eye's pupil and the sphere's is 2.5x10-29 However, if you have two eyes, this ratio doubles. Therefore: 5x10-29, this is 5x10-27 percent.

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14y ago

Fifty percent(50%) Know that it is always 50%... _________________ Fifty percent is a very good estimate, maybe even to the nearest one percent. But I would hold that the actual number must be higher than 50 percent, even if by a very small amount. First, the atmosphere has a 'lensing' affect on the sun's light as it passes the twilight limbs of the planet. Also, the sun, although very far away, is much greater than the earth in diameter. The face of the sun is roughly 860,000 miles across; the better part of one million miles. Earth is a pebble in comparison. So as odd as it seems, a little more than 50% of earth must be illuminated by the sun at any given time.

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14y ago

R = radius of Earths orbit

r = radius of Earth

Area of sphere is 4(Pi)r2

half of the earth is in darkness so area of earth exposed to sun is .5 x 4(Pi)r2

Area or sphere at R 4(Pi)R2

So (.5x4(Pi)r2 / 4(Pi)R2 ) x 100 = 50(r/R)2 %

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12y ago

At any moment, almost* exactly half (to precisely answer, 50%) of earth is lit by the sun and the other half is not.

There's no place on earth that's always light, and no place on earth that's always dark.

* Because the sun is larger than the earth, akin to a huge floodlight shining on a tiny marble, slightly more than half is lit at any one time. However, the size difference (which seems immense) is minute compared with the distance between the earth and sun, so this amount over is not significant (certainly sufficiently below 1% to round down to 0% using whole-number precision). Further, the earth's atmosphere refracts light, which is why we can see a pre-dawn and post-dusk glow; also, moonlight which we can sometimes see at night (depending on clouds and lunar phase) is actually sunlight reflecting off the moon.

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14y ago

59%. The moon is in what is called a tidally locked orbit which means the same side of the moon is always pointing at earth - everyday you always see the same side of the moon.

However, another affect - lunar libration - means that the moon wobbles resulting in a total of 59% of the moon being visible (although obvsiouly not all at the same time).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration

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11y ago

About 50% (excluding land that is shaded by another land mass, lit by reflection, or, conversely, covered by clouds). Parallel rays of light falling on a smooth sphere will illuminate one half of the sphere.

It is actually a little more than 50% illuminated at any given moment.

While the Sun is about 93 million miles away, its diameter is roughly 850 thousand miles. (The Sun's diameter is a little under 1% of its distance from us.) So its rays are not precisely parallel. There is a small angular effect from this huge diameter, and a little more than 50% of the Earth's surface would be directly exposed to the Sun. There is also the bending of light by our atmosphere, causing us to "see" the Sun above the horizon when it is technically already below. There is also the fact that our atmosphere is very good at scattering light. This is why we have dawn and dusk (twilight).

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13y ago

5%, the rest is dark mass

I think the person who answered before is referring to dark matter, which makes up about 80% of the universe. As far as the visible stuff goes, we can only see the part of the universe that light has traveled too. The length that light travels per year is referred to as a "light-year", and that is about 300,000 km. We can see as far as about 13.5 billion light years, however there is much beyond what we CAN see. It is thought that during the Plank era, space expanded faster than the speed of light.

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14y ago

Mostly, the Moon reflects the light from the Sun.

However, it also reflects the sunlight that is reflected from the Earth, and we can see the "earthshine" whenever we look at the crescent Moon; there is a bright sliver of the Moon that is reflecting the Sun's light directly, and a dark, very dimly lit area of the rest of the Moon which glows very faintly with the sunlight that has first bounced off of the Earth and then back off the Moon again.

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10y ago

The Earth's orbit is an ellipse rather than a circle; the percentage of the Sun's radiation that hits the Earth varies VERY slightly from January, when Earth is closest to the Sun, to July, when Earth is farthest away. But let's assume that it is a circle, and see what the math says.

The Earth is about 93,000,000 miles from the Sun. The cross-section of the Earth is approximately circular, with a radius about 3950 miles, so the cross-sectional area of the Earth is about pi * 3950^2, or 49,016,699 square miles.

The area of a sphere with the radius of 1 Astronomical Unit is 93,000,000^2*4*pi or 108,686,539,000,000,000 square miles. (Approximately!) Let's assume that the Sun radiates equally in all directions, which is approximately true based on a couple of solar probes that orbit the Sun in polar orbits. It might be off by some trivial factor, but we don't have enough data to know with precision.

So, 49,016,699 square miles of Earth / 108,686,539,000,000,000 square miles of the orbital shell = .000000045%. So, at a close approximation, "Very little".

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Q: What percentage of light is reflected by earth?
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