Interesting Facts About The Sun You Should Know

Interesting Facts About Sun, a star at the center of the Solar System, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma.

Interesting Facts About Sun

1. The surface temperature of the sun is about 5,778 K.
2. Sun is 4.603 billion years old.
3. The mass of the sun is 1.989 × 10^30 kg.
4. The radius of the sun is 696,340 km.
5. Sun is 149.6 million km away from Earth.
6. Sun rotates on its axis once in about 27 days.
7. The rotation of the sun on its own axis was first detected by observing the motion of sunspots.
8. The Sun’s rotation axis is tilted by about 7.25 degrees from the axis of the Earth’s orbit so we see more of the Sun’s north pole in September of each year and more of its south pole in March.
9. The core area of the sun is the hottest part of it, at 28,080,000°F, on average.
10. The surface of the Sun is 5,800 Kelvin.
11. The center of the Sun is about 15 million Kelvin.
12. The Sun is a large ball of gas.
13. The mean radius of the sun is 432,450 miles.
14. The sun’s diameter is about 864,938 miles.
15. The sun’s circumference is about 2,713,406 miles.
16. The Sun accounts for 99.86% of the mass in the solar system.
17. Over one million Earth’s could fit inside the Sun.
18. The Sun is almost a perfect sphere.
19. The Sun is traveling at 220 km per second.
20. In about 5.5 billion years the Sun will run out of hydrogen and begin expanding as it burns helium. It will swap from being a yellow giant to a red giant, expanding beyond the orbit of Mars and vaporizing Earth, including the atoms that make up you.
21. In terms of the number of atoms, it is made of 91.0% hydrogen and 8.9% helium. By mass, the Sun is about 70.6% hydrogen and 27.4% helium.
22. The color of the sun is white. The sun emits all colors of the rainbow more or less evenly and in physics, we call this combination “white”. That is why we can see so many different colors in the natural world under the illumination of sunlight.
23. The visible part of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius), while temperatures in the core reach more than 27 million F (15 million C), driven by nuclear reactions.
24. The Sun continues to ‘burn’ hydrogen into helium in its core, the core slowly collapses and heats up, causing the outer layers of the Sun to grow larger. It is a very gradual process, and in the last 4 billion years, the Sun has barely grown by perhaps 20 percent at most.
25. The sun gets so hot from its nuclear fusion that it glows and emits light, just like how a piece of metal glows red if you heat it up. There are two main forces at work in nuclear fusion: electromagnetic force and strong nuclear force.
26. The Sun isn’t “made of fire“. It’s made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Its heat and light come from nuclear fusion, a very different process that doesn’t require oxygen.
27. The Sun is the nearest star to our Earth.
28. The Sun is so hot that most of the gas is actually plasma, the fourth state of matter.  When heated up, the liquid turns to gas.
29. The Sun is becoming increasingly hotter / more luminous with time. Astronomers estimate that the Sun’s luminosity will increase by about 6% every billion years.
30. It is a common misconception that the Sun is yellow, or orange, or even red. However, the Sun is essentially all colors mixed together, which appear to our eyes as white.
31. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun. It smallest planet in our solar system. It is slightly larger than Earth’s Moon.
32. Mercury is the fastest planet, zipping around the Sun every 88 Earth days.
33. The sun is hotter than lava. The sun’s temperature of 10,000° F is about five times hotter than the lava.
34. The Sun looks yellow because the Earth’s atmosphere scatters higher wavelength colors, like red, orange, and yellow less easily. Because of these wavelengths, the Sun appears yellow.
35. Sun is not blue because Sun’s surface is not hot enough to emit predominantly blue light.
36. Venus is the second closest planet to the sun at a distance of about 67 million miles.
37. The order of the planets in the solar system is Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus & Neptune.
38. The Sun’s surface area is 11,990 times that of the Earth’s.
39. The Sun holds 99.86% of the mass in the Solar System.
40. The mass of the Sun is approximately 330,000 times greater than that of Earth.
41. The Sun and the rest of the solar system formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust called a solar nebula about 4.5 billion years ago.
42. Ultraviolet waves have more energy than visible light does. This energy is capable of hurting living beings on Earth.
43. The sun lies at the heart of the solar system, which holds 99.8 percent of the solar system’s mass and is roughly 109 times the diameter of the Earth.
44. About one million Earths could fit inside the sun.
45. The Sun will never go supernova. It doesn’t have enough mass to explode. Instead, it will lose its outer layers and condense into a white dwarf star about the same size as our planet is now.
46. The Sun is a yellow dwarf star. Stars in this classification have a surface temperature between 5,300 and 6,000 K and fuse hydrogen into helium to generate their light.
47. Corona is a luminous envelope of plasma that surrounds the Sun and other celestial bodies.
48. The Sun is composed of seven layers: three inner layers and four outer layers.
49. The inner layers of the sun are the core, the radiative zone, and the convection zone.
50. The outer layers of the sun are the photosphere, the chromosphere, the transition region, and the corona.
51. The third layer of the sun’s atmosphere is the corona. It can only be seen during a total solar eclipse as well.

Resources to learn more about the Sun:

• Wikipedia
• How big is the Sun?
• How Round is the Sun?
• First-Ever STEREO Images of the Entire Sun
• The origin and evolution of the solar system
• Helioseismology and Solar Abundances. Physics Reports
• Proposals for the masses of the three largest asteroids, the Moon–Earth-mass ratio, and the Astronomical Unit.
• Handbook of Space Astronomy and Astrophysics 2nd edition
• The new solar abundances – Part I: the observations
• Solar System Exploration: Planets: Sun: Facts & Figures
• Report Of The IAU/IAG Working Group On Cartographic Coordinates And Rotational Elements Of The Planets And Satellites: 2000