The Sun is the largest object within our solar system, comprising 99.8% of the system's mass. It's a yellow dwarf star, a hot ball of glowing gases at the heart of our solar system. It is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth.
Here are 18 mind-blowing facts about our Sun.
- The sun burns hydrogen atoms into helium atoms in its core. In fact, the sun burns through 600 million tons of hydrogen every second.
- As the sun’s core becomes saturated with helium, what happens? It shrinks which causes nuclear fusion reactions to speed up making the sun shoot out more energy. Every billion years it burns hydrogen, our beautiful and very busy sun gets brighter.
- The sun is a main sequence star meaning that it’s a sphere composed primarily of two gases, hydrogen and helium. So if our sun could talk, it would sound funny. Helium right.
- Our sun is not the biggest type star nor is it the smallest. Our sun is a yellow dwarf type star.
- One million earths could fit inside the sun.
- The sun is a near perfect sphere.
- Our sun is all colours mixed together. It appears white to us.
- Temperatures inside the sun can reach 15 million degrees Celsius.
- The Sun is 24,000-26,000 light years from the galactic centre. It takes the Sun 225-250 million years to complete an orbit of the centre of our Galaxy The Milky Way.
- Our sun is middle aged.
- The energy created at the centre of the sun’s core is nuclear fusion.
- Once the Sun has completed its red giant phase, it will collapse. It’s huge mass will be retained, but it will have a volume similar to that of Earth. When that happens, it will be known as a white dwarf.
- If the Sun disappeared, we would only notice its absence after eight-minutes, since it takes eight minutes for sunlight to reach us.
- The Sun weighs an incredible 1,989,100,000,000,000,000,000 billion kilograms. That’s roughly the weight of 330,060 Earth.
- The Sun is of impeccably perfect size, shape, brightness, age, temperature and distance for life to exist on Earth. If it were any different in these categories – ever so slightly – life as we know it wouldn’t exist.
- If you were to take a journey to the Sun in a normal airliner flying at its regular speed (about 644km/h), it would take you 20 years to get there without stopping.
- As the Sun creates energy within its core, the heat from this causes expansion. If not for its enormous gravitational force, the Sun would explode like a giant bomb.
- Solar winds also create some of space’s most beautiful phenomenons such as the dazzling tails of comets and the Aurora Borealis, or The Northern Lights.
And now, for the end of the earth.
In five billion years, the sun will begin its helium burning process and that will turn our cute yellow dwarf sun into a raging, killer red giant. The red giant sun will consume Mercury and Venus and reach Earth boiling all water off of our planet before burning Earth to a cinder and probably consuming it because Earth will be right at the edge of the red giant.
If mankind has not inhabited another star system’s planets by now, this will be the end of humans. But I have a feeling that long before this happens, mankind will be living elsewhere. We are survivors. We love killing each other, but we are survivors. I have faith in us.
But what the hell will we look like then?