The Sun is a giant ball of burning gas at the center of the solar system, representing 99.8% of its mass. It fuses hydrogen into helium and is halfway through its life cycle. After it runs out of nuclear fuel, it will become a white dwarf. The Sun is made of plasma and rotates about once a month. Its core generates its own heat through nuclear fusion, taking a long time to reach the surface. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is about eight and a third light minutes.
The Sun, also known as Sol, is the giant ball of burning gas located at the center of the solar system, in case you haven’t noticed. Representing 99.8% of the mass of the solar system, the Sun continuously fuses four million tons of superheated hydrogen into helium every second. Helium already makes up 25% of its mass.
The Sun is about halfway through its life cycle between its birth and its future transformation into a red giant star, with a diameter as large as the orbit of the Earth. After it has used up its nuclear fuel in about five billion years, most of its atmosphere will escape, forming a planetary nebula and leaving behind a tiny white dwarf. Called a “stellar remnant,” a white dwarf has about half the mass of the Sun but with a volume comparable to that of the Earth. Lacking any nuclear fuel, it slowly gives off its residual heat over many billions of years, eventually becoming a black dwarf. This life cycle is typical of low- to medium-mass stars such as the Sun.
The Sun is a nearly perfect sphere, bulging at the equator by only nine parts in a million. It’s made of plasma, which is a superheated phase of matter that consists of an electron-charged soup with mostly hydrogen nuclei (protons) floating inside. The Sun is convective, circulating its plasma between its layers. The plasma also rotates about once a month: 25 days at the equator, 35 days at the poles. The Sun is the only body in the solar system made of plasma, created by the nuclear furnace at its core.
The core of the Sun is where all the action happens. Extending about 0.2 solar radii from the Sun’s epicenter, the core makes up only 10% of the Sun’s volume, but about 40% of its mass. It’s about 15 times denser than lead, and it’s the only part of the Sun that generates its own heat, through nuclear fusion. It takes an enormous amount of time for the energy generated in the core to reach the surface of the Sun – estimates vary between 17,000 and 50 million years.
The distance from the Earth to the Sun is about eight and a third light minutes. This means that if the Sun exploded, we wouldn’t know about it for about eight minutes. Let’s hope it never happens!
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