The Sun
The Sun is at the centre of our solar system, The Milky Way. It has been at the centre of the universe for 4.57 billion years; making it 4.57 billion years older (much older then your grandparents!)
It is not a planet, in fact The Sun is actually a star because it is made up of many elements such as Hydrogen and Helium and small amounts of Oxygen, Carbon, Iron and many other elements. The Sun is so hot that it has it's own temperature, Kelvin, and the inside of The Sun is the hotter then the outside.
It is not a planet, in fact The Sun is actually a star because it is made up of many elements such as Hydrogen and Helium and small amounts of Oxygen, Carbon, Iron and many other elements. The Sun is so hot that it has it's own temperature, Kelvin, and the inside of The Sun is the hotter then the outside.
It's ShapeThe Sun, like the Earth and Moon is a spherical shape like that of basketball or soccer ball. However the closer you get to the Sun the bigger it looks. It is much bigger then what it looks like outside, but we'll talk about that later.
The Sun is not a perfect sphere, it has spots which are more visible in pictures. These are called "Sunspots", they are areas of intense magnetic activity. They are a different colour because the temperature in the sunspots is cooler then the temperature at the core of The Sun. |
It's Size
The Sun is the biggest planet or star in our solar system. The diameter of the Sun is approximately 1,392,000km which is 109 times bigger then the diameter of the Earth. For this website we have converted the measurements down to metre, centimetres and millimetres. So we can now say that the Sun is in our eyes about 1m in diameter. But it's not going to stay that big, as the sun ages it is going to get bigger and bigger. Much like children do. As children get older they get taller and taller. But when they reach a certain age they start to get smaller and smaller. This is the same with the Sun. When it reaches a certain age, it is going to stop growing and start to get smaller. The picture below shows how this is going to happen with the Sun.
The blue arrow shows where the Sun is in it's life cycle, we can see that it has many billions of years until it starts to get larger and smaller.
The Sun is approximately 149,574,000km away from the Earth, but when we step outside it doesn't look that far away or the size that it is. This is because the further away we are from the Sun, the smaller it seems to be. We said before that the Sun was a metre in diameter, using our same conversions we found out that if we scaled down the measurements the Sun can be seen as being 106m away from the Earth. That is a little bit smaller then the length of a rugby field!
The Sun is approximately 149,574,000km away from the Earth, but when we step outside it doesn't look that far away or the size that it is. This is because the further away we are from the Sun, the smaller it seems to be. We said before that the Sun was a metre in diameter, using our same conversions we found out that if we scaled down the measurements the Sun can be seen as being 106m away from the Earth. That is a little bit smaller then the length of a rugby field!