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Facts about the Sun
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The sun is our everything!
This is light, this is heat and much more.
Without the Sun, life would not have originated on Earth.
Therefore, I really want to dedicate this material to our luminary.
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The sun shines in a blue sky The sun is the only star located in the center of our Solar system and the Earth's climate and weather conditions depend on it.
By galactic standards, our star is hardly noticeable, even in the nearest one in space.
The Sun is only one of the stars of average size and mass, among the 100 billion stars located only in our Galaxy, the Milky Way.
Our star consists of 70% hydrogen and 28% helium.
The remaining 2% is occupied by particles emitted into space and new elements synthesized by the luminary itself.
The hot gases that formed the Sun - mainly hydrogen and helium exist in an incredibly hot electrified state called plasma.
The sun is a red hot gas ball The energy capacity of the Sun is about 386 billion megawatts and is produced in the process of fusion of hydrogen nuclei, which is commonly called thermonuclear fusion.
In the distant distant past, the Sun shone weaker than now.
Continuous observations of radiation maxima for several decades have allowed scientists to conclude that the increase in the luminosity of the Sun continues in our time.
So, in just the last few cycles, the total luminosity of the Sun has increased by about 0.1 %.
Such changes have a huge impact on our lives.
In addition to thermal energy and visible light, the Sun emits a giant stream of charged particles into space, called the solar wind.
It is moving through the Solar system at a speed of about 450 kilometers per second.
The age of the Sun, according to scientists, is about 4.6 billion years.
This gives a high probability to assume that it will continue to exist in its current form for the next 5 billion years.
Eventually, the Sun will swallow up the Earth.
When all the hydrogen burns out, the Sun will last for about 130 million more years, burning helium.
During this period, it will expand to such an extent that it will absorb Mercury, Venus and Earth.
At this stage, it can be called a red giant.
It takes about 8 minutes for sunlight to reach the Earth's surface.
With an average distance of 150 million kilometers to the Earth and light traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second, simply dividing one number by another (distance by speed) gives us an approximate time of 500 seconds, or 8 minutes and 20 seconds.
The particles that reach the Earth during these few minutes take millions of years to travel from the core of the Sun to its surface.
The sun moves along its orbit at a speed of 220 kilometers per second.
The sun is located almost on the outskirts of the Milky Way, 24,000-26,000 light years from the center of the galaxy, and therefore it takes 225-250 million years to make one complete orbit around the center of the Milky Way.
The distance from the Sun to the Earth varies throughout the year.
Since the Earth moves in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, the distance between these celestial bodies varies from 147 to 152 million kilometers.
The average distance between the Earth and the Sun is called an astronomical unit (AU).
The pressure in the Sun's core is 340 billion times greater than the atmospheric pressure at the Earth's surface.
The diameter of the Sun is equivalent to 109 diameters of the Earth.
The surface area of the Sun is equivalent to 11990 surfaces of the Earth.
If the Sun was the size of a football ball, Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball, and the Earth would be the size of a pea.
The gravity on the surface of the Sun is 28 times greater than on Earth.
Therefore, a person who weighs 60 kg on Earth will weigh 1680 kg in the Sun.
Simply put, we will be crushed by our own weight.
The light from the Sun reaches the surface of Pluto in 5.5 hours.
The nearest neighbor of the Sun is the star Proxima Centauri.
It is located at a distance of 4.3 light years.
Approximately a trillion solar neutrinos are passing through your body as you read this sentence.
The brightness of the Sun is equivalent to the brightness of 4 trillion trillion 100 watt light bulbs.
The brightness of the Sun is equivalent to the brightness of 4 trillion trillion 100 watt light bulbs.
An area of the Sun's surface the size of a postage stamp shines like 1.5 million candles.
The amount of energy reaching the surface of our planet is 6000 times more than the energy needs of people around the world.
The Earth receives 94 billion megawatts of energy from the Sun.
This is 40,000 times more than the annual demand of the United States.
The total amount of fossil fuel on the planet Earth is equivalent to 30 solar days.
A total solar eclipse lasts a maximum of 7 minutes and 40 seconds.
There are about 4-5 solar eclipses a year.
Physical characteristics of the Sun The beautiful symmetry of a total solar eclipse occurs because the Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon, but also 400 times farther from the Earth, which makes these 2 bodies the same across in size in the sky.
1.3 million Earth sized planets can be placed in the full volume of the Sun.
99.86% of the total mass of the Solar system is concentrated in the Sun.
The mass of the Sun is 1,989,100,000,000,000,000 billion.
kg or 333060 times the mass of the Earth.
The temperature inside the Sun can reach 15 million degrees Celsius.
In the core of the Sun, energy is generated by nuclear fusion as hydrogen is converted into helium.
Since hot objects tend to expand, the Sun explodes like a giant bomb, if it were not for its enormous gravitational force.
The temperature on the surface of the Sun is closer to 5600 degrees Celsius.
The Earth's core is almost as hot as the surface of the Sun, which is about 5600 degrees Celsius.
Colder are certain areas called sunspots (3,800° C).
Different parts of the Sun rotate at different speeds.
Unlike ordinary planets, the Sun is a large ball consisting of incredibly hot hydrogen gas.
Because of its mobility, different parts of the Sun rotate at different speeds.
To see how fast the surface rotates, it is necessary to observe the movement of sunspots relative to its surface.
Spots at the equator take 25 earth days to make one revolution, while spots at the poles make a revolution in 36 days.
The outer atmosphere of the Sun is hotter than its surface.
The surface of the Sun reaches a temperature of 6000 degrees Kelvin.
But it's actually much smaller than the Sun's atmosphere.
Above the surface of the Sun is a region of the atmosphere called the chromosphere, where temperatures can reach 100,000 Kelvin.
But that doesnot mean anything.
There's an even more distant region called the corona, which extends to a volume even larger than the Sun itself.
The temperature in the corona can reach 1 million Calvin.
Inside the Sun, where thermonuclear reactions occur, the temperature reaches an unthinkable 15 million degrees.
The sun is an almost perfect sphere with a difference of only 10 km in diameter between the poles and the equator.
The average radius of the Sun is 695,508 km (109.2 x Earth's radius).
According to the type of stellar magnitude, it belongs to a yellow dwarf (G2V).
The diameter of the Sun is 1,392,684 kilometers.
The sun has a very strong magnetic field.
Solar flares occur when energy streams of charged particles are released by the Sun during magnetic storms, which we see as sunspots.
In sunspots, the magnetic lines are twisted and they rotate, just like a tornado on Earth.
Does water exist in the Sun?
A rather strange question... because we know that there is a lot of hydrogen in the Sun, the main element of water, but in order for there to be water, we also need such a chemical element as oxygen.
Not so long ago, an international group of scientists discovered that the Sun is water (in particular, water vapor).
water vapor).
In history, ancient cultures erected stone monuments or modified rocks to mark the movements of the Sun and moon, the change of seasons, created calendars and calculated eclipses.
Despite the correct reflections of some ancient Greek thinkers, many believed that the Sun revolves around the Earth, starting with the ancient Greek scientist Ptolemy who presented a "geocentric" model in 150 BC.
Only in 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus described a heliocentric, sun oriented model of the Solar System, and in 1610, Galileo Galilei's discovery of the moons of Jupiter showed that not all celestial bodies revolve around the Earth.
In 1990, NASA and the European Space Agency launched the Ulysses probe to take the first images of the polar regions of the Sun.
In 2004, NASA's Genesis spacecraft collected samples of the solar wind to Earth for analysis for study.
The most famous spacecraft (launched in December 1995) that observes the Sun is the SOHO Solar and heliospheric Observatory, built by NASA and ESA, and continuously observes the sun by sending countless photographs to Earth.
It was created to study the solar wind, as well as the outer layers of the Sun and its internal structure.
It depicted the structure of sunspots below the surface, measured the acceleration of the solar wind, detected coronal waves and solar tornadoes, detected more than 1,000 comets, and made it possible to more accurately predict space weather.
A more recent NASA mission is the STEREO spacecraft.
These are two spacecraft launched in October 2006.
They were designed to observe activity on the Sun simultaneously from two different viewing points at once, in order to recreate a three dimensional perspective of the Sun's activity, which allows astronomers to better predict space weather.
The sun vibrates due to a set of acoustic waves, like a bell.
If our vision were sharp enough, we would see how the vibrations spread along the surface of its disk, writing out intricate patterns.
Astronomers from Stanford University have carefully studied the movements on the surface of the Sun.
Solar sound waves tend to have a very low oscillation frequency that cannot be detected by the human ear.
In order to be able to hear, the scientists amplified them 42,000 times and pressed in a few seconds of waves measured over 40 days.
Alexander Kosovichev, the head of the scientific group and a member of the Stanford team for the study of solar oscillations, found a simple way to convert data from equipment measuring the vertical movement of the Sun's surface into sound.
Steven Taylor, a professor of music at the University of Illinois, composed the music for this video with sounds.
The team used a new method to calculate the spectrum of water at the temperature of sunspots.
In their research since 1995, the team has registered the presence of water - certainly not in liquid form, but in a state of steam - in the dark areas of sunspots.
Scientists compared the infrared spectrum of hot water with sunspots.
The water in the sunspots causes something like a "stellar greenhouse effect" and affects the discharge of energy from the spots.
Hot water molecules, in addition, most strongly absorb infrared radiation in the atmosphere of cold stars.
Since 1610, Galileo Galilei was the first in Europe to observe the Sun with his telescope, thereby laying the foundation for regular studies of sunspots and the solar cycle, which have been going on for more than four centuries.
140 years later, in 1749, one of the oldest observatories in Europe, located in the Swiss city of Zurich, began to conduct daily observations of spots, at first simply counting and sketching them, and later began to receive photos of the Sun.
Currently, many solar stations continuously observe and register all changes on the surface of the Sun.
The most famous period of change of the Sun is the eleven year solar cycle, during which the sun passes through the minimum and maximum of its activity.
The solar cycle is most often determined by the number of sunspots on the photosphere, which is characterized by a special index - the Wolf number.
This index is calculated as follows.
First, the number of groups of sunspots is calculated, then this number is multiplied by 10 and the number of individual spots is added to it.
The coefficient of 10 roughly corresponds to the average number of spots in one group; thus, it is possible to estimate the number of spots on the Sun fairly accurately, even in cases when poor observation conditions do not allow directly counting all small spots.
Below are the results of such calculations for a huge period of time, starting from 1749.
They clearly show that the number of spots on the Sun periodically changes, forming a cycle of solar activity with a period of about 11 years.
Currently, there are at least 2 organizations that independently conduct continuous observations of the solar cycle and count the number of spots on the Sun.
The first is the Sunspot Index Data Center in Belgium, where the so called International Sunspot Number is determined.
It is this number (and its standard deviation DEV) that is shown in the table that has already been given above.
In addition, the number of spots is counted in the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The number of spots defined here is called NOAA sunspot number.
The earliest observations of sunspots at the end of the XVII century, that is, at the dawn of the era of their systematic research, showed that the Sun at that time passed through a period of extremely low activity.
This period was called the Maunder Minimum, which lasted almost a century, from 1645 to 1715.
Although the observations of those times were not carried out as carefully and systematically as modern ones, nevertheless, the passage of the solar cycle through a very deep minimum is considered by the scientific world to be reliably established.
The period of extremely low solar activity corresponds to a special climatic period in the history of the Earth, which was called the "Little Ice Age".
Everything that happens on the Sun strongly affects our planet and people, however, there are two explosive solar events that affect us the most.
One of them is solar flares, where a small area on the surface of the Sun suddenly breaks through tens of millions of degrees of radiation waves that can disable telecommunications and satellites.
Another type of phenomenon is a coronal mass ejection, where billions of tons of charged particles of energy separate from the solar corona at a speed of millions of kilometers per hour.
When these massive clouds fall into the protective magnetosphere of the Earth, they squeeze the magnetic field lines and
they fall into the protective magnetosphere of the Earth, they squeeze the magnetic field lines of force and bring down millions of trillion watts of power into the upper atmosphere.
This leads to overloads on power lines, as a result of which all sensitive equipment and all objects located in orbit around the Earth are disconnected and damaged.
Often these two phenomena occur together, as it was in October 2003.
Thanks to modern measuring devices, such an event can be detected at an early stage and makes it possible to take the necessary measures.
Analysis of the SOHO and Yohkoh data showed that giant loops of X rays in the hot solar corona provide important magnetic connections between the spots and the magnetic poles of the Sun.
These giant loops are about 500,000 miles long and filled with 3.5 million people.
F hot, electrified gas.
They appear in the growth phase in the 11 year cycle of sunspots and are associated with the release of energy from the spots, which occurs every 1-1.5 years and causes a cyclic reversal of the Sun's magnetic poles.
It is assumed that these compounds play an important role in the "solar dynamo" - a process that produces strong magnetic fields of the Sun and is the source of sunspots, solar flares and mass ejections that affect the Earth.
The activity of spots increases from a minimum to a maximum for about 11 years, i.e. after 22 years, a new cycle begins.
During this time, the entire magnetic field of the Sun changes - the north pole becomes the south pole and vice versa; then they will change places again in the next cycle.
The solar surface is covered with bubbles the size of the state of Texas.
Granules are parts of a plasma with a short lifetime of heat transferred by convection to the surface, like water bubbles in a boiling water surface.
The rise and fall of the bubbles produces sound waves that cause sounds to emit every 5 minutes.
The most powerful in the entire history of observations was the geomagnetic storm of 1859 — A complex of events that includes both a geomagnetic storm and the powerful active phenomena that caused it on the Sun, sometimes called the "Carrington Event" , which in the literature was called a "Solar Superstorm".
The most powerful magnetic storm was observed by mankind in August 1972.
It was fast, intense and large, but the most important thing that turned it into a historical phenomenon was the polarization of its magnetic field opposite the Earth.
When its magnetic field hits the Earth's magnetic field, the two fields combine and are sent into the upper atmosphere of a huge stream.
Electrical equipment, telegraph, telecommunications were put out of operation in a large part of Europe and America.
The proton storm was the strongest in 1989.
It was particularly saturated with high acceleration protons covered with 100 million electron volts of energy.
Such protons can penetrate an 11 cm hole in the water.
Other facts about the Sun Only 55% of all American adults know that the Sun is a star.
Doing sports in the sun increases the consumption of energy and calories.
According to the proverb, those born at dawn will be smart, but those who were born at sunset will be lazy.
Heliotherapy is one of the oldest and most affordable methods of treating human ailments.
It is not surprising that they say that where the sun comes, diseases go away.
According to research, the sun's rays act on specific receptors in the retina of the human eye, which sends a signal to the brain to produce more serotonin.
And, as we all know, it is a hormone of happiness.
Just 15 minutes of daily exposure to the Sun is enough to force the body to produce the necessary amount of vitamin E, which is vital for our body.
The pigmentation of the skin protects the deeper layers of the body from the effects of ultraviolet rays.
The color of the sky depends primarily on the layers of air pollution, such as smoke or dust.
The normal color of the sky is blue due to the refraction of sunlight by atmospheric hydrogen.
Red sunsets are caused by heavy pollution in the atmosphere.
When sunlight passes through the atmosphere, the rays of the layers with a shorter wavelength retain and absorb only the rays with a longer wavelength pass through the atmosphere, which are red, orange and yellow rays.
Large amounts of dust and dirt and even stop the yellow light, and only the red cross.
The red sky is observed especially well during volcanic eruptions.
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