00002: The Sun

Welcome Again!

                                          

Today's "Centre" of attraction is none other than the Red sphere of hot plasma, i.e. "The Sun". Like any other object in space, Sun also doesn't like to be stable, so it rotates.

Our Sun formed from a great cloud of dust and gas around 4.6 billion years ago, so technically its age is 4.6 billion years. Damn, its too old, yet so young ! ( in comparison to The Big Bang) 

Unlike Earth, which rotates as a solid object, Sun being a gas giant , turns at different speeds at different places. The Equator of the Sun takes 25 days to rotate once, where as polar regions take 34 days.

We have already seen many features about Sun in school books, so lets ignore the obvious features and get into the interesting facts...

Sun, as you know is the main attraction of the Solar system and is the centre of the Solar system. 

But, surprisingly, Sun is not the centre of revolution of the planets in the solar system; Basically planets and stars revolve around the common centre of mass which is assumed to be the sun, but, because of the huge mass of Jupiter, the common centre of mass is shifted to a point outside the surface of the sun and that point is called Barycentre. And this point changes according to the moment of Jupiter.

Speaking of the beauty of Sun , it's blazing hot, 5500°C on the surface and immensely hot at its centre around 15,00,000°C. Man that's too hot..

The amount of energy given out by sun just blows your mind, it gives around 385 million billion gigawatts of energy per second. 

Phew! That's a lot of energy...

Before you leave, I have another interesting thing. 

What is the colour of the Sun,

Like many artistic illustrations and popular belief, you might have thought that it's yellow/orange/red.

If you've thought so, you might be wrong. It's a common misconception that the Sun is yellow, orange or even red. However, the sun essentially emits all colours mixed together, which appears to our eyes as white, which in physics is termed as "White Light", so technically, the sun is White in colour. Due to the scattering and other natural phenomena which occur while the light enters Earth's atmosphere, the sun appears as yellow or red or orange. 

Picture taken with a solar filter

For instance, it appears white during hot mid-day, but during sunrise and sunset, it appears orangish-red/yellow, but it doesn't mean sun emits different colours at different times of the day, it's just because of the Earth's atmosphere, which shows different colours at different times.

Earlier, we spoke about the age of the sun, according to research, sun is at its most stable phase now compared from the time of its birth, it may have around 5 billion years left before it runs out of fuel. Before it dies, sun turns into a red giant star and eventually a white dwarf (not a supernova) , during that, our Earth will be vaporised a few million years after Mercury and Venus have been consumed.

And after all that,  It wipes out every form of life ; if life has existed only here...

Thank you for reading, see you in the next one.