6 Awesome Facts About the Sun

We all know that without the sun, there would not be any life on our planet, as it supplies all of the energy that we use. We also know that the sun is a huge, massive, bright and powerful object. But let's get a bit more specific and uncover some more important details, awesome facts and more about our sun.

6 Awesome Facts about the Sun

1. There is No True Surface of the Sun: The sun doesn't have any solid material and therefore has no true surface. What we see as the surface is known as the photosphere, which is a very thin layer of the sun that releases the electromagnetic radiation that we see.

2. That "Surface" Isn't Even Really that Hot: Well, the photosphere is certainly hot by our standards, with a temperature of 5800 K. The core of the sun however, where nuclear fusion occurs, has a temperature of 15,000,000 K and the corona, or the hot upper atmosphere, has a temperature of 3,000,000 K.

3. 10 billion Nuclear Bombs per Second: Every single second, the sun produces an equivalent amount of energy to 10 billion 1-megaton nuclear bombs. If that energy was focused on our planet, our entire crust would melt in three minutes. In six seconds, all of the oceans on the planet would be completely evaporated.

4. The Sun is Thinning Out: Solar wind is gas that is hot and distant enough from the center of the sun to escape its gravity. Two million tons of matter leaves the sun in the form of solar wind every second. Don't worry though, that massive seeming figure has resulted in just a .1 percent loss of mass over 4.6 billion years.

5. Sunspots Aren't Really Black: Sunspots, which are caused by the magnetism of the sun and typically occur in pairs and groups, appear as black but aren't really black. They are just cooler areas of the sun that seem dark compared to the brighter and hotter gas around them. They maintain a temperature of about 4500 K, as opposed to the 5800 K photosphere that we see.

6. Prominences, Flares and Mass Ejections: A prominence is a loop or sheet of gas ejected from the sun, typically measuring 100,000 kilometers, or ten times the size of our planet, but also appearing occasionally many times larger than that as well. They can last for hours or weeks, and are caused by magnetic instabilities. Flares are the violent, explosive version of prominences that last for just minutes. Coronal mass ejections are giant bubbles or streams of ionized gas that escape into space at times once per week and at other times several times per day.

Source: Chaisson and McMillan, Astronomy Today, Sixth Edition. 2008.