28 Amazing facts about the Sun

Amazing facts about the Sun.

1.  When all the Hydrogen on the Sun will be burnt by burning Helium, the Sun will continue for 130 million more years.  During this stage, it will expand and become a red giant and will engulf Mercury, Venus and the Earth.

2.  The mass of the Sun is very high that it contains 99.86% of the mass in the Solar System, which is almost three quarters Hydrogen and the rest is mostly Helium.

3.  The Sun is an almost perfect sphere, only 10 kilometers is the difference in its polar diameter to equatorial diameter.

4.  It takes millions of years for light to travel from the Sun’s core to its surface.  The average distance between Earth and the Sun is 150 million kilometers and light will take approximately eight minutes and 20 seconds, or 500 seconds to reach Earth’s surface from the Sun.

5.  Current type of the Sun is known as a Yellow Dwarf.  The sun is middle-aged and it has burned off about half of its Hydrogen and it will take another 5 million years to burn the other half.

6.  The temperature inside the Sun will be around 15 million degrees Celsius, which is due to the energy generated by the nuclear fusion, as Hydrogen is converted to Helium.

7.  The Sun has a very strong magnetic field and solar flares occur when magnetic storms are occurred on the Sun and magnetic energy is released.

8.  When the Moon comes between the Sun and the Earth, solar eclipse occurs.

9.  386 billion billion megawatt is the output of the Sun’s energy.

10.  The Sun loses 5 million tons of material every second.

11.  The Sun is one among the 200 billion stars in Milky Way and it is one among the 6000 stars which are visible to naked eye.

12.  Only 55% of all Americans know that the Sun is a star!

13.  It is illegal to walk backwards after sunset in Devon, Connecticut and also illegal to smoke from a pipe after sunset in Newport, Rhode Island.

14.  Solarmax is a cycle which  happens every eleven years, in which the magnetic poles of the Sun switch.

15.  7 minutes and 58 seconds is the maximum time for a solar eclipse to last, because of the Sun’s speed.

16.  The Sun is so big that, it can accommodate 109 Earth’s on its surface and more than one million Earth’s would fit inside the Sun.

17.  The Sun’s gravity is 28 times that of Earth because of its huge mass.

18.  The solar wind,is a steady stream of charged particles, which blows about 450 kilometers per second.

19.  Solar flares can knock out electricity on Earth and disrupt satellite communications, which are jets of particles that burst from the Sun.

20.  Indo-European, Egyptian and Meso-American cultures all are sun-worship religions.

21.  The first person to claim that the Earth orbited the Sun was the Greek philosopher Aristarchus.

22.  Nicholas Copernicus argued that the Earth traveled around the Sun, but it was not accepted for many years until Newton formulated his laws of motion.

Statistical facts about the Sun

23.  Do you know the age of the Sun?  It is 4.6 billion years.

24.  The Sun is now of  Yellow Dwarf (G2V) type.

25.  Diameter of the Sun is 1,391,016 km.

26.  4,370,005.6 km is the circumference of the Sun at equator.

27.  The Sun is 333,060 times heavier than the Earth, mass of the Sun is 1,989,100,000,000,000,000,000 billion kg.

28.  Surface temperature on the Sun is 5500 °C.

Also read: Amazing facts about Earth, Amazing facts about Moon and Amazing facts about the Universe.