Question: if the earth went too close to the sun what would happen?

Sara Imari Walker answered on 17 Jun 2011:

Hi rosacrawford! Interesting question! If the Earth got too close to the Sun the temperature of our planet would dramatically increase. A rise in global temperature can have dramatic effects on our weather (think global warming gone mad!). If we were very close to the Sun, our oceans would boil and our atmosphere would burn away. We would become like mercury – a barren planet with no atmosphere. Because mercury doesn’t have a protective atmosphere, it has huge temperature differences between night and day (100K during the night and over 700K during the day). Fortunately we don’t have to worry about this though! Earth is in a nice stable orbit in our stars habitable zone. Every star has a region where the temperature is just right for liquid water, and for life! Earth happens to be right in the middle for our Sun – so viola, here we are!