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- The sun takes about 225 million to 250 million years to orbit one time around the galactic center.
www.nationalgeographic.org › encyclopedia › sun
Length of year: The Sun doesn't have a "year," per se. But the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way about every 230 million Earth years, bringing the planets, asteroids, comets, and other objects with it.
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- How The Sun Formed
- Internal Structure and Atmosphere of The Sun
- The Sun's Magnetic Field
- Chemical Composition of The Sun
- Sunspots and Solar Cycles
- History of Observing The Sun
The sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago. Many scientists think the sun and the rest of the solar system formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. As the nebula collapsed because of its gravity, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. Most of the material was pulled toward the center to form the sun. Relat...
The sun and the atmosphere of the sun are divided into several zones and layers. The solar interior, from the inside out, is made up of the core, radiative zone and the convective zone. The solar atmosphere above that consists of the photosphere, chromosphere, a transition region and the corona. Beyond that is the solar wind, an outflow of gas from...
The sun's magnetic field is typically only about twice as strong as Earth's magnetic field. However, it becomes highly concentrated in small areas, reaching up to 3,000 times stronger than usual. These kinks and twists in the magnetic field develop because the sun spins more rapidly at the equator than at higher latitudes and because the inner part...
Just like most other stars, the sun is made up mostly of hydrogen, followed by helium. Nearly all the remaining matter consists of seven other elements — oxygen, carbon, neon, nitrogen, magnesium, iron and silicon. For every 1 million atoms of hydrogen in the sun, there are 98,000 of helium, 850 of oxygen, 360 of carbon, 120 of neon, 110 of nitroge...
Sunspots are relatively cool, dark features on the sun's surface that are often roughly circular. They emerge where dense bundles of magnetic field lines from the sun's interior break through the surface. The number of sunspots varies as solar magnetic activity does — the change in this number, from a minimum of none to a maximum of roughly 250 sun...
Ancient cultures often modified natural rock formations or built stone monuments to mark the motions of the sun and moon, charting the seasons, creating calendars and monitoring eclipses. Many believed the sun revolved around the Earth, with the ancient Greek scholar Ptolemy formalizing this "geocentric" model in 150 B.C. Then, in 1543, Nicolaus Co...
Feb 12, 2015 · In a few billion years, the sun will become a red giant so large that it will engulf our planet. But the Earth will become uninhabitable much sooner than that.
May 25, 2021 · How Old Is the Sun? Is it really old? Or not so much? Our Sun is 4,500,000,000 years old. That's a lot of zeroes. That’s four and a half billion.
The Sun has been an object of veneration in many cultures. It has been a central subject for astronomical research since antiquity. The Sun orbits the Galactic Center at a distance of 24,000 to 28,000 light-years. From Earth, it is 1 AU (1.496 × 10 8 km) or about 8 light-minutes away.
Jul 9, 2024 · It is about 4.5 billion years old. In another 5 billion years the Sun will become a big, cool star called a red giant. A few billion years after that, it will become a small white dwarf star. It will shrink to around the same size as Earth, but it will weigh 20,000 times more. Click the above image to expand it.
Feb 2, 2024 · Evolution of the Sun The sun, although it has sustained all life on our planet, will not shine forever. The sun has already existed for about 4.5 billion years. The process of nuclear fusion, which creates the heat and light that make life on our planet possible, is also the process that slowly changes the sun’s composition.
