The Sun

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. The Sun is by far the largest object in the solar system. It contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System.

[frame src=”http://www.tedzy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/sun.jpg” align=”left” style=”2″ linkstyle=”pp” linksto=”http://www.tedzy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/sun.jpg” title=”The Sun”]It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields. It is often said that the Sun is an “ordinary” star. That’s true in the sense that there are many others similar to it. But there are many more smaller stars than larger ones; the Sun is in the top 10% by mass. The median size of stars in our galaxy is probably less than half the mass of the Sun.

The Sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a region within a large molecular cloud. Most of the matter gathered in the center, while the rest flattened into an orbiting disk that would become the Solar System.

The Sun’s power (about 386 billion billion megaWatts) is produced by nuclear fusion reactions. Each second about 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted to about 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons (=3.86e33 ergs) of energy in the form of gamma rays.

The surface of the Sun, called the photosphere, is at a temperature of about 5800 K. Sunspots are “cool” regions, only 3800 K (they look dark only by comparison with the surrounding regions). Sunspots can be very large, as much as 50,000 km in diameter. Sunspots are caused by complicated and not very well understood interactions with the Sun’s magnetic field.

[frame src=”http://www.tedzy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Sun_poster.jpg” align=”left” style=”2″ linkstyle=”pp” linksto=”http://www.tedzy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Sun_poster.jpg” title=”The Sun Poster”]The mean distance of the Sun from the Earth is approximately 149.6 million kilometers, though the distance varies as the Earth moves from perihelion in January to aphelion in July. At this average distance, light travels from the Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes and 19 seconds. The energy of this sunlight supports almost all life on Earth by photosynthesis, and drives Earth’s climate and weather.

The Sun’s magnetic field is very strong (by terrestrial standards) and very complicated. Its magnetosphere (also known as the heliosphere) extends well beyond Pluto.

The Sun is composed primarily of the chemical elements hydrogen and helium; they account for 74.9% and 23.8% of the mass of the Sun in the photosphere, respectively. All heavier elements, called metals in astronomy, account for less than 2% of the mass. The most abundant metals are oxygen (roughly 1% of the Sun’s mass), carbon (0.3%), neon (0.2%), and iron (0.2%).

Leave a Reply