Cosmic ruling

摘要

The sun still shines as bright, but according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), its precise distance from us has just changed. At a meeting in Beijing, China, the IAU voted to redefine the astronomical unit, used to indicate distances between objects in the solar system. The unit is now 149.597,870,700 metres. Historically, the unit was calculated based on the average distance between Earth and the sun, or 149,597,870,691 metres. An amendment in 1976 made things more difficult by tying it to the Gaussian gravitational constant.