20 MIndblowing facts about the Sun Compilation
First of all,
THE SUN IS VERY OLD. It is one of 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Scientists estimate
that the Sun is about 4.5 billion years old. We never measured the age of the sun directly,
it would be impossible. All that we have are
indirect methods to estimate it. To have an idea, we look at the age
of the whole solar system, because we assume it all came together around the same time.
To get this number,
we look for the oldest things we can find. For instance, moon rocks work well for this.
That’s the reason why, when astronauts went to the moon, they brought some rocks
back for scientists to study them, they were able to find out how old they are.
A really
important thing to know is the composition of the Sun. Observing it in the sky, we might think it
has the shape of a ball, or we could suspect it is a sphere. Sure, that’s true, but…how is it made?
Well, we know that…
. THE SUN IS NOT SOLID!
It
is composed of plasma, a material made from electrically charged gas atoms. It is about
75 percent hydrogen and about 25 percent helium. The remaining traces are tiny amounts of metals.
A really interesting thing is that Jupiter has the same composition as the sun.
If the sun were smaller, it would just be a huge ball of hydrogen akin to Jupiter.
The hydrogen in the sun's core is held together by a lot of gravity resulting in high pressure.
The pressure is so high that when hydrogen atoms collide with enough
force they create a new element — helium — in a process called nuclear fusion.
The continual nuclear fusion, causes energy to build up and the sun's core reaches temperatures
of about 27 million degrees F (15 million degrees C). The energy then radiates outward to the sun's
surface, atmosphere, and beyond. We can feel this energy on Earth:
we can feel the heat of the sun on our skin. It is what helps us dry our clothes every day. The
amazing thing however is that... THE SUN IS REALLY FAR AWAY.
It is about 93 million miles away from Earth. If we wanted to sort all the planets from the
closest to the furthest, we would come out with this list: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, with Mercury being 35.000.000 miles away from the sun, and Neptune
lying 2.8 billion miles away from it.
An easy mnemonic often used for remembering the order is “My Very Educated Mother Just
Served Us Noodles.”. But I think it’s time to change it because it might sound a bit sexist.
Do you have any other simple ideas? Let us know in the comments
below!
Oh, I forgot to mention that . THE SUN IS HUGE. It is about 865,000
miles in diameter!
To get a better idea, that’s as wide as 109 earths placed side by side!
Oh, and something like 1 million Earths would fit inside the Sun.
Amazing, isn’t it? This giant object wonders in space.
What we know is that . IT MOVES VER-R-R-Y SLOWLY.
The Sun is the center of our solar system, of course, but it doesn’t stay in one place. It
orbits the center of the milky way galaxy, and it takes the Sun about 226 million years to go around
the galaxy once! For comparison, the dinosaurs went extinct around 65 million years ago.
However,
not only the sun orbits the milky way center. It also rotates around its axis in the same direction
as Earth does, i.e. counterclockwise, when looking down from the north pole.
But … . SECTIONS OF THE SUN SPIN AT DIFFERENT SPEEDS.
Because the Sun is gaseous, different sections rotate at different speeds. At the surface,
the area around the equator rotates once about every 25 days. The Sun’s north and south poles
rotate more slowly. It can take those areas more than one month to complete one rotation.
As fact number seven, THE SUN HAS A LOT OF PULL.
It makes up more than 99 percent of the total mass of the solar system. Being this massive,
the Sun exerts a lot of gravity, or pull, on the planets — enough to cause them to orbit around it.
When people understood this, it was mindblowing. The Kepler laws describe how the planets orbit
around this pulling monster. Believe it or not, the Sun’s gravity is about 27.9 times that of
Earth's.
Don’t ask how, but astronomers found a way to quantify the energy coming from the sun.
What they discovered is unbelievable. . THE SUN IS A ENORMOUS BALL OF ENERGY.
The Sun’s core is under a lot of pressure. Because of this, hydrogen atoms are constantly
colliding with each other at great speeds, fusing to form helium and releasing energy.
But where does this energy come from? Well, lots of these collisions occur,
creating an enormous amount of energy. Think about this: in just 1 second,
the Sun produces about 118 trillion times as much energy as the United States used in the year 2003!
Fact number 9 might seem obvious,
but it’s worth reminding you that… THE SUN IS HOT.
Even if it is not your boyfriend or girlfriend. Its temperature is not constant: it varies over
time and through its eight layers. One thing is sure: the hottest part of the Sun is the core, at
28,080,000 degrees F, on average.
And did you know that… . THE SUN HAS SPOTS?
This is due to its magnetic field.
When the Sun’s magnetic field pokes through the surface, it prevents the heat rising inside
from coming through. Some kinds of tubes are created where the divergence of the magnetic
field is constant, making the pressure lower in the tube and therefore lowering the temperature.
As a result, the Sun’s surface in these areas is cooler and darker than its surroundings,
although still very bright.
These dark areas are called sunspots. Sunspots are not permanent and they can move slowly across
the surface of the Sun changing size as they move. By observing them, in principle, one can get the
rotation velocity of a star.
The appearance of sunspots on the sun also follows the solar cycle of eleven years.
What does this mean? Every eleven years there will be a period of increased sunspot activity.
Sunspots vary in size from as small as 10,000 miles across to as large as 100,000 miles across.
Hey, if you are enjoying this video, you should watch our video about the solar
system. You will find some mindblowing facts about our place in the universe.
We said the Sun has a magnetic field, but do we know anything about its shape? Well,
as a first approximation, The magnetic field of the sun has
a spiral shape. It’s called the Parker spiral. As the Sun rotates, its magnetic field twists
into what’s called an Archimedean spiral, as it extends through the Solar System.
This phenomenon is often called the Parker spiral, after Eugene Parker's
work. This guy predicted the structure of the interplanetary magnetic field! Did you hear
me well? He predicted it! With equations! The influence of this spiral-shaped magnetic
field on the interplanetary medium (solar wind) creates the largest structure in the Solar System,
the heliospheric current sheet. You should be careful not to get too
close to the Sun, and that’s because you could get instantly pulverized.
We know this because sometimes areas of the Sun suddenly appear much brighter. These bright spots
are called solar flares. They are areas where a large amount of energy is released to the surface
of the Sun.
Solar flares emit bursts of electromagnetic radiation including high-energy X-rays and
gamma rays. The energy released by a single solar flare can be more
powerful than a million nuclear bombs going off at the same time.
Here’s what they look like.
These monstrous flares
are made of particles, and when they are released, they can reach Earth in just a few minutes. These
particles can damage electronic components in satellites and can also affect some radio signals.
Perhaps
the most important fact about the Sun is that… It is a pretty average star
Our Sun is not so special in the universe. It is an average-sized star: there are smaller stars and
larger stars, even up to 100 times larger. Many other solar systems have multiple suns, while ours
just has one. Our Sun is 864,000 miles in diameter and 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface.
For instance, we have found stars that are 100 times bigger in diameter than our sun.
Truly, those stars are enormous. We have also seen stars that are just one-tenth the size of our sun.
For instance, the Sun would be just a small dot if compared to Stars like Rigel and Aldebaran.
However,
maybe the sun is a bit unusual, in the sense that…we don’t find it in a multiple-star system.
It is not bound to any other close star. It's just one Sun surrounded by planets,
asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets. But solar systems can have more than one sun.
That's often the case. More than half of all stars are in multiple-star systems.
That means that in general, other star systems have two or more suns in them.
Can you imagine having two suns in the sky at the same time? Well, there are plenty of
planets throughout the universe where that is normal. Multiple sunsets, multiple sunrises,
what a life that would be. Or maybe not.
The Sun is approximately halfway through its lifespan. If it was a person, we could
say he is almost forty, I guess. Since we said it was four and a
half billion years old, it still has something like 5 billion years to go.
And when those five billion years are up…
the Sun will become a red giant. Our star will get bigger and cooler at the same time.
When that happens, it will be different than the Sun we know today. As a red giant, our Sun
will become about 2,000 times brighter than it is now! And we would be long gone. Hopefully.
. Our Star Without a doubt,
if you were to list the "most important things in the solar system we live in", the Earth may
be No.1, but the sun is No.2. And for all the reasons that you might expect and 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—a
stream 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 to
just 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 humanity as 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 when we 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 just how important the sun is, you should tell them all the
ways we need the sun, our star, to shine on. . The Sun’s Formation
Let's talk about how our sun got formed, shall we? Long before our solar system was born,
the universe was a big wasteland of nothing. Or at the very least, that's what we believe
it was. Then, through one means or another, there was an event known as the Big Bang.
This expansion of energy and matter spread throughout the universe both known and unknown
and created a great many things. And when it didn't specifically create something, it left
the building blocks to all things to be made. In 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
to a 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 led to it folding in upon itself. 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 when you have a massive thing of gas folding in on itself, things tend to get massive.
And as the cloud began to compress, it also started spinning, until eventually there
was a giant pancake disc spinning around in our solar 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 still
a pancake. It's estimated that over the next 50 million years that the sun slowly gathered more
mass and more energy from the cloud. Likely due to its spinning 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 ball of 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. . 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 massive gravity 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 "masterpiece 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 so many 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 stuff couldn'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 part of them,
but they were absorbed either into the ground or into the very atmosphere itself.
As things forms, things slowly changed in how the solar system worked. Again, because of the
star. Once objects were a true certain mass they went 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 roundabout way.
All told, the way our solar system looks right now is because of the sun in large part. Thus,
we owe it more than we could ever realize. 2. Atmosphere
Above the photosphere lie the tenuous chromosphere and the corona (crown), which
make up the thin solar atmosphere. This is where we see features such as sunspots and 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, while the corona forms a beautiful white
crown with plasma streamers narrowing outward, forming shapes that look like flower petals.
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 Star
Defining the "end" of a stars life is a bit more complicated than you might expect. Mainly because
stars don't die in the traditional sense most times, they go into different phases of life,
and sometimes "die" in order to create new 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 could consume 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.
Thanks for watching everyone! What did you think of this look at the sun and its facts and history?
Are you surprised by how much the sun has helped shape not only our world, but our solar system?
Which of these facts did you find the most interesting? Let us know in the comments below,
be sure to subscribe, and I'll see you next time on the channel!