Hottest Part Of The Sun

All About the Sun

A star is a hot, glowing ball of gas. When you wait up in the night heaven, you tin can encounter countless twinkling stars. Tin can y'all meet any stars during the daytime? Of form! The lite of daytime comes from our closest star: the Dominicus.

Explore the Sun! Click and drag to rotate the Sunday. Curlicue or pinch to zoom in and out. Credit: NASA Visualization Technology Applications and Development (VTAD)

Just how close is the Sun to World? Way, way closer than other stars, but even so pretty far away. It'due south approximately 93 million miles away from Earth. That's 400 times farther than the distance betwixt Earth and the Moon!

However, it'south a skillful thing that Earth isn't also close to the Sun. If we were also close, information technology would exist mode as well hot to live here. The Sun'southward surface is very hot, and its atmosphere is fifty-fifty hotter. And the Dominicus's core is the hottest role of all, at a sizzling 27 meg degrees Fahrenheit!

Our Lord's day is nigh 100 times wider than Earth, but it is just an average sized star. Astronomers have found some stars that are 100 times bigger than the Sun and others that are x times smaller.

Cartoon of the Sun looking upset and saying Hey! Who are you calling average?

The Sunday is also right in the middle of its lifecycle. Right at present, our Sun is in a stage called xanthous dwarf. Information technology is most 4.5 billion years onetime. In some other 5 billion years the Lord's day will get a large, cool star called a blood-red giant. A few billion years after that, it volition become a small white dwarf star. It will shrink to around the aforementioned size as Earth, simply it volition weigh xx,000 times more.

Chart encompassing 14 billion years that shows the Sun's phases, including birth, now, gradual warming, red giant, planetary nebula and white dwarf.

Click the above image to expand it. Our Sun is in the middle of its lifecycle. Information technology is a yellowish dwarf star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

But even though our Sun is kind of an ordinary star, in that location are also a few things that brand our Lord's day quite special. For example…

We can't alive without the Sun!

Life on Globe depends on the Sun. Here are but a few reasons why:

The Sun's gravity holds our unabridged solar system together. Our solar system is even named after the Sun (the Latin word for Sun is "sol").
Heat from the Sun makes Earth warm enough to live on.
Without light from the Sunday, there would be no plants or animals—and, therefore, no food and we wouldn't exist.

Cartoon of the Sun looking happy and the Earth saying thank you!

Estrus and lite might exist of import for life on Earth, but the Dominicus sends other stuff, too. The Sun sends lots of other energy and small particles toward Earth. Globe'southward protective magnetic field and atmosphere shields us from most of the energy and particles. But sometimes a big stream of these particles reaches Globe and interacts with the gases at the outer edge of our temper. This causes streams of light in the sky, chosen auroras.

The Sunday's Neighbors

In our solar arrangement, the closest planet to the Sun is Mercury. Our Dominicus's closest star neighbor is called Proxima Centauri. Information technology is approximately 4 light-years away.

What does the Sun look like?

Start of all, y'all should never await directly at the Lord's day without very special protective eyewear. But NASA has many great pictures of the Sun for y'all to look at! Scientists apply telescopes with filters to capture images of the Sun. These images help us acquire about our star. The photo below was taken by a NASA spacecraft called the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

The Sun on a dark background with a solar flare on its bottom left side.

This image captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory on June 20, 2013, shows the bright calorie-free of a solar flare on the left side of the Lord's day. Credit: NASA/SDO

Have whatsoever spacecraft visited the Sun?

A spacecraft would easily burn up if information technology tried to fly into the Sun. However, NASA's Parker Solar Probe is flying closer than whatsoever other robotic explorer ever has. It volition be flight inside the Dominicus's atmosphere, or corona. This spacecraft will help us larn more than about how the Sun works and how solar activity starts. This helps us to be more than prepared!

More fun facts about the Sun!

The Sun goes through ups and downs in activity like solar flares. It gets more active with more than sunspots and so less active over a menstruum of 11 years. This is chosen the solar wheel.
The Sun has been getting slowly brighter since it was born. A couple of billions of years ago, the Sun was a piffling dimmer than it is now.
The Dominicus contains most ALL of the material in our solar system. 99% of it. All the planets, asteroids and comets add upwards to less than 1% of the total.
The Sun is so far away that it takes light about 8 minutes and 20 seconds for it to get to united states – and calorie-free is the fastest matter in the universe.