sidereal year
Sign in to savetime taken by the Earth to orbit the Sun once with respect to the fixed stars
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- unit of time
- Subclass of
- year
Show 3 more facts
- conversion to standard unit
- 31558149.8
- different from
- tropical year
- described by source
- The Nuttall Encyclopædia
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~4 min read
Encyclopedic overview
A sidereal year (/saɪˈdɪəri.əl/, US also /sɪ-/; from Latin sidus 'asterism, star'), also called a sidereal orbital period, is the time that Earth or another planetary body takes to orbit the Sun once with respect to the fixed stars.
Thus, a sidereal year is the interval required for Earth to travel once around the ecliptic, completing one revolution about the Sun and returning to the same orbital position relative to the background stars.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “sidereal year” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.