Even if you were to go down into the Sun, although the gas would get thicker and thicker, so that the distance you can see would get smaller and smaller, there would never ever, even in the very center, be any hint of any actual physical surface. Just as if you were to drive to where a "haze surface" was you would see perfectly normal air and landscapes all around you, if were standing at the "surface" of the Sun you would be able to look for tens or hundreds of miles in all directions, and see no sign of any surface save for the hazy apparent surface created by the absorption of light by the gases surrounding you. The surface is not an actual physical surface, but an optical surface similar to the apparent surface created when haze or smog makes it impossible to see distant objects. The Sun consists of an atmosphere, which we can look through to the surface, and an interior which is beneath the surface and not directly visible. In addition, the Sun is very important to astronomers, because being by far the closest star, we can study it in far more detail than any other star. And in almost every other respect, whatever properties are discussed for the Sun there are stars with much larger or much smaller values than those which apply to the Sun.ĭespite being a very average star, the Sun is of immense importance to us, because our lives depend upon its light and heat. Stars with as much as a few million times its brightness, and as little as one fifty-thousandth of its brightness. Stars with up to a thousand times the diameter of the Sun, and as little as a hundredth of its diameter. There are stars with more than a hundred times the mass of the Sun, and stars with as little as a few percent of its mass. It gives off approximately 400 trillion trillion watts (4 x 10 26 watts) of power, which is created by thermonuclear reactions in its deep interior.ĭespite its immense size, mass and brightness the Sun is actually a fairly average star. These high temperatures tear any molecules or atoms of hydrogen and helium to pieces, and those pieces are much smaller than ordinary atoms, so even at very high densities the materials in the Sun are still gaseous.īecause of the Sun's high temperature and large size it radiates a tremendous amount of light and to a lesser extent, other kinds of electromagnetic radiation. This difference is caused by the Sun's high temperature, which ranges from a low of 6000 Kelvins (about 10000 Fahrenheit) at the surface to a high of about 15 million Kelvins (almost 30 million Fahrenheit) in the center. However, unlike Jupiter, which is made of liquid hydrogen and helium, the Sun is entirely gaseous. This happens to be about a thousand times the mass and a thousand times the volume of Jupiter, so the Sun is, like Jupiter, about 30% denser than water. The Sun is an immense ball of gases nearly a million miles in diameter, with a mass of more than 300,000 times the mass of the Earth.
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