20 cool #facts about the Sun you really need to make your eyes read through and know. :-D 1. Our sun loses 4 million metric tons of mass every second. 2. The largest known star UY Scuti is 5 billion times the size of the Sun. It would take 2.2 hours to cross its diameter at the speed of light. 3. Because Jupiter is so heavy, Sun orbits a point between itself and Jupiter. Jupiter orbits a point outside of the sun itself. This is called the ‘Barycenter’. 4. The Sun has completed 18-20 orbits of the Milky Way galaxy since its birth, but it has only completed 1/1250th of its orbit since the dawn of humans. Also, the last time the sun was in its current position, dinosaurs were on the Earth, and would be for another 180 million years or so. 5. Even if a black hole with the same mass as the sun were to replace it, Earth and the other planets would orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now and not get sucked in. 6. Neptune has only completed one orbit of the Sun since its discovery in 1846. 7. The Sun accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. 8. A photon emitted from the sun’s core takes 100,000-200,000 years to reach its surface. 9. The sun is 400x bigger and also 400x further away than the moon, meaning they look almost identical in size in our sky. 10. If the Sun was to be scaled down to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way would be the size of the continental United States. 11. Jupiter’s Magnetosphere (strength of the planet’s magnetic field) is larger than the entire Sun and nearly 20,000 times greater than Earth’s. 12. All satellites orbiting Earth must complete an orbit in less than 7 months. Otherwise, they will fall out of Earth orbit and orbit the Sun instead. 13. Kilogram for kilogram, the human body generates 8000 times more power than the Sun. 14. There are loops of superheated plasma on the surface of the sun called Coronal Loops that can reach up to 1 million degrees Kelvin, while the average temperature of the sun is only 5700 degrees Kelvin. One recorded loop reached the size of 10 Earths. 15. The sun is actually white. It is only perceived as yellow because of the atmospheric scattering. 16. There is a town in the Italian Alps that does not get any direct sunlight for 84 days. However, the town fixed that by installing a giant mirror on the side of the mountain. 17. During the Cretaceous period (145 – 100 million years ago), Earth’s climate was so warm that there were no polar ice caps, and forests probably extended all the way to the South Pole. Local plants and dinosaurs evolved to live in continuous sunlight in the summer and darkness in the winter. 18. Space tornadoes have observed on the surface of the sun, which are thousands of times larger and more powerful than their earthly counterparts. 19. The sun is 4.6 billion years old and is in its midlife. In 5.4 billion years, it will become a Red Giant and “planet Earth will not be able to escape engulfment.” 20. The sun is theoretically not hot enough for fusion and only undergoes fusion because of quantum tunneling.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 16:31:54 +0000
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