Sunday is the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. It is dark in the morning and gets dark again mid evening. I don’t like it. This is the time when we start to yearn for a bit of light and warmth. Unfortunately we have a few months of winter to get through first – the time of cold and wet where the land is shut down. It shuts my spirits down too.
But we do have two things to look forward to:
Christmas – which were the pagan Solstice festivals – a time to celebrate the rebirth of the sun with much rejoicing.
The drawing out of the days! – Yes – starting tomorrow the days are drawing out again (even though it gets colder!).
I thought it would be a good idea to take a little look at some facts about the sun to cheers us up (or at least to cheer me up).
We live in the Goldilocks region. Our planet orbits at exactly the right distance from the sun to allow life to exist – it is not too hot and not too cold. This is not as surprising as it sounds. If we didn’t life would not have arisen (at least not in the form it has). So eat up your porridge and give thanks.
The sun is very big! Over one million Earths could fit inside it. It accounts for 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system – or put another way – all the planets and asteroids clumped together would only account for 0.14%. So it is very big – much bigger that it seems when sitting on the horizon.
The sun is very small! Or at least the sun is just average compared to other stars. Betelgeuse, a red giant, is about 700 times bigger than the sun and about 14,000 times brighter! We’d certainly need sunglasses!
Our sun is currently a white dwarf but one day it will expand into a huge red giant and consume all the planets out to Venus – including the Earth. We will all be vaporised along with every fossil and bit of evidence that we ever existed! We have only got 5 billion years left to start planning!
Our sun is pretty nippy – travelling at 220 km per second – but then so are we!
Our sun is 91% Hydrogen, 7.8% Helium, and 1% other gases, and runs on fusion power. We are trying to perfect fusion power on Earth to give us unlimited clean energy – it’s much cleaner than fission power. But it is hard to create a bit of the sun on Earth. You need very bright scientists.
The sun is 4.5 billion years old! Happy birthday! It is now in middle age – halfway through its life and having a bit of a mid-life crisis – breaking out in sunspots!
Light from the sun takes eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach the earth – so if it has just erupted we won’t know about it for eight minutes and twenty seconds (less the time it took you to read this!)
The sun is very hot – its temperature is approximately between 5500 and 6000 degrees Celsius. The only way you could land on it is to go up at night!
The sun is a ball of gas and has no solid surface so if you did try to land on it you’d need to take a bit of ground with you!
The sun’s gravity is 28 times stronger than earth’s gravity so it would not be good for most sport’s events as competitors would be squashed – even though you would not require floodlighting.
Nuclear reactions occur within the core of the sun, due to its temperature and pressure! The heat and energy released from the core of the sun take a million years to reach its surface! A million years! One guy in Los Angeles used to charge tourists $50 to see a nuclear explosion. He took their money, pointed up at the sun and ran away.
The sun only emits three types of energy – infra-red, ultra-violet and visible light. If it wasn’t for the ozone layer we’d be burnt by the UV and would have hides like a rhinoceros.
Solar flares occur when there are changes in magnetism that throw gouts of plasma out into space. The amount of energy released during a flare is equivalent to a simultaneous explosion of millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs. This explosion is ten million times greater than a volcanic eruption but less than 1/10th of the total energy emitted by the sun per second. But it is still best to use protective clothing when standing close to a solar flare!
Ancient religions used to worship the sun as an actual deity riding across the heavens. Makes as much sense as any other religion to me.