#8. Our star without a doubt, if you were to list the "most important things in the solar system we livein", the Earth may be No.1, but the sun is No.2. And for all the reasons that you might expectand know. Its gravity holds the solar system together,keeping everything from the biggest planets to the smallest particles of debris in its orbit.
Electric currents in the Sun generate a magnetic field that is carried out through the solar system by the solar wind—astream of electrically charged gas blowing outward from the Sun in all directions. The connection and interactions between the sun and Earth drive the seasons, ocean currents, weather, climate, radiation belts and aurora.
In short, and in long, the sun is vital tojust about everything we do on this planet, and we rely on the sun to do MANY things,even though we're honestly not controlling anything that it does. Which is a bit of an odd thing for humanityas humans like to control EVERYTHING that has to do with us.
The sun is something we see almost every day(obviously unless cloud cover is blocking it or an eclipse is happening) and even whenwe don't see it, we feel its presence. It's more than just a ball of light in the sky, it's an energy source, a lifeline in many respects, and as noted above,
it helps shape our planet in various ways that would detrimental if it WASN'T doing it. So if someone was to honestly ask you justhow important the sun is, you should tell them all the ways we need the sun, our star,to shine on.
#7. Distance From Earth and Its Size With a radiusof 432,168.6 miles (695,508 kilometers), our Sun is not an especially large star—many are several times bigger—but it is still far more massive than our home planet: 332,946 Earths match the mass of the Sun. The Sun’s volume would need 1.3 millionEarths to fill it.
After all, would we WANT to have a giant ballof fire and radiation just lurking out there that can swallow us whole if it felt like it? Honestly, yes, yes we would, and for a very simple reason, its distance from the Earth is 150 crores km.Which is a very LONG ways away, and in factit's such a distance that they came up with a term for it via "Astronomical Unit".
So when you hear that a planet or star issay 103 AUs away, that means it's 103 times the distance between the Earth and the sun. Going back to the distance itself, you might think that this is a "very long way away" from the entity that gives us light and essentially,life. But actually, it's better that we're NOT closer to the sun for a whole host ofreasons.
Sunlight and its energy dissipates the farther you get away from it. Which is why there is such thing as a "Habitable Zone" in regards to stars where life can exist as well as water and other key things needed for life. The closer you are to a star, the more impactyou're going to get from its heat and light.
The farther you are from a star, the less likely you're going to get heat and light in the amounts you need. Lest you think we're exaggerating this, wehave the perfect examples for this. It's called Mercury, Venus and Mars.It's average temperature is 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Plus, because it's so close to the sun it'stidally locked, meaning that it has one "side" always facing the sun, and the other sideis always away from it.
In regards to Venus, it's our "twin" but alsoa case of the suns energy turning it into something else entirely. A buildup of heat and excess carbon dioxide turned it into a "Runaway Greenhouse Planet" which makes it so hot that it can melt lead.
And it's also the hottest planet in the solarsystem because of the green house effect which was caused by the suns' radiation. Heading to Mars, it's so far away from the Sun that it can't absorb the sunlight and energy like we do on Earth, so its average temperature is -81 degrees Fahrenheit.
Not to mention it doesn't have a typical atmospherein any sense so various solar and cosmic rays bombard the planet. And it's so far away from the sun that even if Earth settled on the planet, using solar panels to get energy for colonies wouldn't be as viable as you think because thedistance is so great.
So as you can see, it's GOOD that we are 93 million miles away from the sun, it's the literal perfect spot to be in to get the positive effects of the sun without many of the negatives.
And if you're curious, its nearest stellar neighbor is the Alpha Centauri triple star system: Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light years away, and Alpha Centauri A and B—two stars orbiting each other—are 4.37 light yearsaway.
A light year is the distance light travelsin one year, which isequal to 5,878,499,810,000 miles or 9,460,528,400,000 kilometers. Before we continue to break down the sun,be sure to like or dislike the article, that way we can continue to improve our content for you.
#6. Orbit And Rotation The Sun, and everything that orbits it, is located in the Milky Way galaxy as you well know. More specifically, our Sun is in a spiralarm called the Orion Spur that extends outward from the Sagittarius arm.From there, the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, bringing the planets, asteroids, comets and other objects along with it.
Our solar system is moving with an average velocity of 450,000 miles per hour (720,000 kilometers per hour). But even at this speed, it takes us about 230 million years to make one complete orbit around the Milky Way. Which is quite astounding when you think about it.
The Sun rotates as it orbits the center of the Milky Way. Its spin has an axial tilt of 7.25 degrees with respect to the plane of the planets’ orbits. Since the Sun is not a solid body, differentparts of the Sun rotate at different rates.
At the equator, the Sun spins around once about every 25 days, but at its poles the Sun rotates once on its axis every 36 Earth days. Imagine if something like this happened onour planet where the days were different based on what section you were on and how fast itwas rotating, that would be a very hard schedule to keep up with.
Thankfully we don't have to worry about thatas we are a solid planet.
#5. The Suns FormationLet's talk about how our sun got formed, shall we? Long before our solar system was born, theuniverse was a big was teland of nothing. Or at the very least, that's what we believeit was.
Then, through one means or another, therewas an event known as the Big Bang. This expansion of energy and matter spread throughout the universe both known and created a great many thingsIn regards to our solar system, that would be what is known as the Solar Nebula. Or to break it down for you, a massive cloud of gasses and matter and particles and molecules.
But how does it go from a massive cloud toa bright ball of warmth and energy we call the sun? The answer to that is time, pressure, and a little bit of luck. Most scientists who believe in the Solar Nebula theory understand the concept of the cloud being there and then somehow starting to make the planets and the sun But what many aren't sure about is the actual 'event' that ledto it folding in upon it self.
What we do know (or at least can theorize)is that when this started to happen, when the Solar Nebula started to destabilize, it compressed upon itself,And as the cloud began to compress, it also started spinning, until eventually there was a giant pancake disc spinning around in oursolar system.
Not exactly a sun, but a big step in getting there. In fact, most label this as a "Protostar",and when that happened the sun was born...right?
Not exactly. Because while it was a protostar, it was stilla pancake. It's estimated that over the next 50 millionyears that the sun slowly gathered more mass and more energy from the cloud. Likely due to itsspinning nature and the gravity it was exuding.
Eventually, once it got enough mass and energy,the process of nuclear fusion began in the sun, and that led it to being the big ballof light and "fire" that we call the sun. So a major piece of our solar system had been made.
All told, our sun is believed to be as old,or pretty close to being as old, as our whole solar system. Which would mean that right now, our sun is about 4.5 billion years old.
#4. How Its Formation Affected The Solar System But that's not the end of the story in regards to formation of our system. Because as noted earlier, the sun has a massivegravity to it, and that gravity started to reach out across the barren parts of the solar system and started to make things happen.
Though as some have noted, it wasn't exactly a "master piece of creation", many speculate that when the sun got fully formed and its gravity loomed large, things just...happened. This is one of the reasons why there are somany objects in our solar system, and why there are so many different kinds of planets.
Some of the planets are gas giants because that's all they had to work with (or they had solid dense cores and the gasses just run to that) and when they were big enough and such, regular matter like rocks and stuffcouldn't stick to it.
In contrast, planets like Earth, Mars, and others were able to go and be solid because of the matter that was around them. The gasses of the nebula were still a partof them, but they were absorbed either into the ground or into the very atmosphere itself. As things forms, things slowly changed inhow the solar system worked. Again, because of the star.
Once objects were a true certain mass theywent into orbit around the sun. Other objects were launched into space or pulled closer to the sun and collided with other objects. Some think that this is why happened to the Earth that caused the moon to be formed in a round about way. All told, the way our solarsystem looks right now is because of the sun in large part. Thus, we owe it more than we could ever realize.
#3. Construction It's very easy to say that the sun is a "giant ball of light and heat", but in truth it'sMUCH more complicated than that.
In terms of the number of atoms, it is madeof 91.0% hydrogen and 8.9% helium. By mass, the Sun is about 70.6% hydrogen and27.4% helium.The Sun's enormous mass is held together by gravitational attraction, producing immense pressure and temperature at its core. At the core, the temperature is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius), which is sufficient to sustain thermonuclearfusion.
This is a process in which atoms combine toform larger atoms and in the process release staggering amounts of energy. Specifically, in the Sun’s core, hydrogenatoms fuse to make helium. The energy produced in the core powers theSun and produces all the heat and light the Sun emits.
#2. Atmosphere Above the photosphere lie the tenuous chromosphere and the corona (crown), which make up thethin solar atmosphere. This is where we see features such as sunspotsand solar flares. Visible light from these top regions is usually too weak to be seen against the brighter photosphere, but during total solar eclipses, when the moon covers the photosphere,
the chromosphere looks like a red rim around the Sun, whilethe corona forms a beautiful white crown with plasma streamers narrowing outward, formingshapes that look like flower Petaluma Strangely, the temperature in the Sun's atmosphere increases with altitude, reaching as high as 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius).
The source of coronal heating has been a scientific mystery for more than 50 years.
#1. The End Of Our StarDefining the "end" of a stars life is a bit more complicated than you might expect. Mainly because stars don't die in the traditionalsense most times, they go into different phases of life, and sometimes "die" in order to createnew stars.
In the case of our sun, which is a Yellow Dwarf, it'll "die" in its current state in about 5-7.5 billion years depending on who you ask. When that happens, it'll become a Red Giant,which is significant because these are MUCH bigger than Yellow Dwarfs. In fact, when that happens, the Earth will honestly die because the sun will swallow it up in its new state more than likely.
Some even speculate that the Red Giant couldconsume everything up to Jupiter. Again, this is many billions of years away,but it will happen, and much like the sun made our solar system, the sun will also help destroy it.
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