About Sun

Picture
Compared with the billions of other stars in the universe, the sun is unremarkable. But for Earth and the other planets that revolve around it, the sun is a powerful center of attention. It holds the solar system together; pours life-giving light, heat, and energy on Earth; and generates space weather.

The sun is a big star. At about 864,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) wide, it could hold 109 planet Earths across its surface. If the sun were a hollow ball, more than a million Earths could stuff inside it. But the sun isn't hollow. It's filled with scorching hot gases that account for more than 99.8 percent of the total mass in the solar system. How hot? The temperature is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius) on the surface and more than 28 million degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 million Celsius) at the core.

Deep in the sun's core, nuclear fusion reactions convert hydrogen to helium, which generates energy. Particles of light called photons carry this energy through the sun's spherical shell, called the radiative zone, to the top layer of the solar interior, the convection zone. There, boiling motions of gases (like in a lava lamp) transfer the energy to the surface. This journey takes more than a million years.

The sun's surface, or atmosphere, is divided into three regions: the photosphere, the chromosphere, and the solar corona. The photosphere is the visible surface of the sun and the lowest layer of the atmosphere. Just above the photosphere are the chromosphere and the corona, which also emit visible light but are only seen during a solar eclipse, when the moon passes between the Earth and sun.

  Sunspots & Solar Cycle

Picture
Sunspots are relatively cool, dark features on the sun's surface that are often roughly circular. They emerge where dense bundles of magnetic field lines from the sun's interior break through the surface. The number of sunspots varies as solar magnetic activity does — the change in this number, from a minimum of none to a maximum of roughly 250 sunspots or clusters of sunspots and then back to a minimum, is known as the solar cycle, and averages about 11 years long. At the end of a cycle, the magnetic field rapidly reverses its polarity.


                         CME (Coronal Mass Ejections)

Picture
Coronal mass ejections are explosions in the Sun's corona that spew out solar particles. A lot of material is thrown out into the solar wind. Coronal mass ejections can be dangerous when they hit the Earth.

CME's can seriously disrupt the Earth's environment. Intense radiation from the Sun, which arrives only 8 minutes after being released, can alter the Earth's outer atmosphere, disrupting long-distance radio communications. Very energetic particles pushed along by the shock wave of the CME can endanger astronauts or fry satellite electronics. These energetic particles arrive at the Earth (or Moon) about an hour later. The actual coronal mass ejection arrives at the Earth one to four days after the initial eruption, resulting in strong geomagnetic storms, aurora and electrical power blackouts.

Picture