The SUN Its hot enough to melt any

The SUN

It's hot enough to 
melt any metal. It's 
so far away that its 
light takes eight 
minutes to reach your 
eyes. If it were a 
hollow ball, more than 
one million Earths 
could fit inside it

The sun is a star. It is a huge, 
spinning, glowing sphere of 
hot gas. The sun is just like 
the stars that you see in the 
night sky. It appears so 
much larger and brighter 
than the other stars because 
we are so close to it. The sun 
is the center of our solar 
system. All of the planets in 
our solar system, including 
Earth, orbit around the sun.

How far is the sun from earth? The sun is at an average distance of about 
 93, 000 miles away from Earth. It is so far away 
that light from the sun, traveling at a speed of 
 186, 000 miles (300, 000 meters) per second, takes 
about 8 minutes to reach us. Like all of the other 
planets in our solar system, Earth does not travel 
around the sun in a perfect circle. Instead its orbit 
is elliptical, like a stretched circle.

Does the Sun rotate? • Let’s check it out? • http: //apod. nasa. gov/apod/ap 140312. html

Does the Sun revolve? • NO it does not!

What is the sun made of? The sun is a huge, glowing 
sphere of hot gas. Most of 
this gas is hydrogen (about 
 70%) and helium (about 28%). 
Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen 
make up 1. 5% and the other 
 0. 5% is made up of small 
amounts of many other 
elements. The sun shines 
because it is burning 
hydrogen into helium in its 
extremely hot core. This 
means that as time goes on, 
the sun has less hydrogen 
and more helium.

Why does the sun have spots? The sun has a magnetic field that is twisted around inside 
the sun as it spins. There are places on the sun where this 
magnetic field rises up from below the sun's surface and 
pokes through, creating sunspots. Sunspots are magnetic 
and often have a north and south pole like a magnet. They 
come and go over the surface of the sun and last from a 
few days to a few weeks.

How big is a sunspot? The average sunspot is about the size of the entire 
planet Earth! However, sunspots come in a variety 
of sizes ranging from hundreds to tens of 
thousands of miles across (many times larger that 
Earth). Scientists measure the total size (area) of 
all of the sunspots seen on the sun every day to 
get a measure of how active the sun is. Sunspots 
are not permanent. They appear and disappear on 
the surface of the sun. They are cooler than the rest of the sun, but are still very hot!

Click on the 
telescope see 
current images 
of the sun