Does the sun's gravity affect your weight?

Answer 1

Technically, yes. But certainly not enough that you would notice it.

In my drawer full of file folders full of articles that describe gadgets which I will

build some day, there is one for an electronic thing that monitors minute changes

in the force and direction of local gravity. But I mean really truly minute changes ...

if you build it with enough care, so it says, you can see the daily variations that

are due to the over passing of the sun and moon. Now that's minute!

The ratio of (your weight towards the Earth) and (your weight towards the sun)

should be

earth's mass/sun's mass times [distance to sun's center/distance to Earth's center]2 .

When I plug some numbers into that, I get about 1,623 . So if, for your mass, your

weight on Earth should be 200 pounds, then the influence of the sun would make

you appear to be something like 2 ounces lighter than that at noon, and 2 ounces

heavier at midnight. (This completely ignores any influence of the moon, which

probably ought to figure into it too.)

I used:

Earth radius . . . 4,000 miles

Sun distance . . . 93 million miles

Earth mass . . . . 5.9742 x 1024 kg

Solar mass . . . . 1.989 x 1030 kg