The Sun for Kids - Fun Facts & Pictures All About the Sun, Solar Cycles, and Solar Space Missions

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Ads help our organization grow to help people learn more and develop our site. Maintenance is not cheap. More help, more resources, more learning. We're so excited to continue to grow and support the parents and teachers championing children's education. KidsKnowIt Network is now part of Education. It is important for the Earth because it provides warmth and solar energy. Here are some fun facts about it! Scientists and astronomers do not use the word Sol. From Earth, when you look up at the sky, the Sun looks yellow or orange. In the early first millennium BC, Babylonian astronomers observed that the Sun's motion along the ecliptic is not uniform, though they did not know why; it is today known that this is due to the movement of Earth in an elliptic orbit around the Sun, with Earth moving faster when it is nearer to the Sun at perihelion and moving slower when it is farther away at aphelion.

One of the first people to offer a scientific or philosophical explanation for the Sun was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras. He reasoned that it was not the chariot of Helios , but instead a giant flaming ball of metal even larger than the land of the Peloponnesus and that the Moon reflected the light of the Sun. In the 1st century AD, Ptolemy estimated the distance as 1, times the radius of Earth , approximately 7. The theory that the Sun is the center around which the planets orbit was first proposed by the ancient Greek Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BC, and later adopted by Seleucus of Seleucia see Heliocentrism.

This view was developed in a more detailed mathematical model of a heliocentric system in the 16th century by Nicolaus Copernicus.

Observations of sunspots were recorded during the Han Dynasty BC—AD by Chinese astronomers , who maintained records of these observations for centuries. Averroes also provided a description of sunspots in the 12th century. Galileo posited that sunspots were on the surface of the Sun rather than small objects passing between Earth and the Sun. Arabic astronomical contributions include Albatenius ' discovery that the direction of the Sun's apogee the place in the Sun's orbit against the fixed stars where it seems to be moving slowest is changing.

Ibn Yunus observed more than 10, entries for the Sun's position for many years using a large astrolabe. From an observation of a transit of Venus in , the Persian astronomer and polymath Avicenna concluded that Venus is closer to Earth than the Sun. In , Isaac Newton observed the Sun's light using a prism , and showed that it is made up of light of many colors. In the early years of the modern scientific era, the source of the Sun's energy was a significant puzzle. Lord Kelvin suggested that the Sun is a gradually cooling liquid body that is radiating an internal store of heat.

Not until was a documented solution offered. Ernest Rutherford suggested that the Sun's output could be maintained by an internal source of heat, and suggested radioactive decay as the source. The theoretical concept of fusion was developed in the s by the astrophysicists Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Hans Bethe. Hans Bethe calculated the details of the two main energy-producing nuclear reactions that power the Sun.

The first satellites designed to observe the Sun were NASA 's Pioneers 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, which were launched between and These probes orbited the Sun at a distance similar to that of Earth, and made the first detailed measurements of the solar wind and the solar magnetic field. Pioneer 9 operated for a particularly long time, transmitting data until May In the s, two Helios spacecraft and the Skylab Apollo Telescope Mount provided scientists with significant new data on solar wind and the solar corona.

The Helios 1 and 2 probes were U. This spacecraft was designed to observe gamma rays , X-rays and UV radiation from solar flares during a time of high solar activity and solar luminosity. Just a few months after launch, however, an electronics failure caused the probe to go into standby mode, and it spent the next three years in this inactive state.

In Space Shuttle Challenger mission STSC retrieved the satellite and repaired its electronics before re-releasing it into orbit. The Solar Maximum Mission subsequently acquired thousands of images of the solar corona before re-entering Earth's atmosphere in June Launched in , Japan's Yohkoh Sunbeam satellite observed solar flares at X-ray wavelengths. Mission data allowed scientists to identify several different types of flares, and demonstrated that the corona away from regions of peak activity was much more dynamic and active than had previously been supposed.

Yohkoh observed an entire solar cycle but went into standby mode when an annular eclipse in caused it to lose its lock on the Sun. It was destroyed by atmospheric re-entry in All these satellites have observed the Sun from the plane of the ecliptic, and so have only observed its equatorial regions in detail. The Ulysses probe was launched in to study the Sun's polar regions. It first travelled to Jupiter , to "slingshot" into an orbit that would take it far above the plane of the ecliptic. Elemental abundances in the photosphere are well known from spectroscopic studies, but the composition of the interior of the Sun is more poorly understood.

A solar wind sample return mission, Genesis , was designed to allow astronomers to directly measure the composition of solar material. Two identical spacecraft were launched into orbits that cause them to respectively pull further ahead of and fall gradually behind Earth. This enables stereoscopic imaging of the Sun and solar phenomena, such as coronal mass ejections.

Its main instrument will be a coronagraph for studying the dynamics of the Solar corona. The brightness of the Sun can cause pain from looking at it with the naked eye ; however, doing so for brief periods is not hazardous for normal non-dilated eyes. Viewing the Sun through light-concentrating optics such as binoculars may result in permanent damage to the retina without an appropriate filter that blocks UV and substantially dims the sunlight. When using an attenuating filter to view the Sun, the viewer is cautioned to use a filter specifically designed for that use.

Some improvised filters that pass UV or IR rays, can actually harm the eye at high brightness levels. The sunlight that is destined for the eyepiece is reflected from an unsilvered surface of a piece of glass.

Only a very small fraction of the incident light is reflected. The rest passes through the glass and leaves the instrument. If the glass breaks because of the heat, no light at all is reflected, making the device fail-safe. Simple filters made of darkened glass allow the full intensity of sunlight to pass through if they break, endangering the observer's eyesight. Unfiltered binoculars can deliver hundreds of times as much energy as using the naked eye, possibly causing immediate damage.

It is claimed that even brief glances at the midday Sun through an unfiltered telescope can cause permanent damage. Partial solar eclipses are hazardous to view because the eye's pupil is not adapted to the unusually high visual contrast: During partial eclipses most sunlight is blocked by the Moon passing in front of the Sun, but the uncovered parts of the photosphere have the same surface brightness as during a normal day. This can damage or kill those cells, resulting in small permanent blind spots for the viewer.

During sunrise and sunset , sunlight is attenuated because of Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering from a particularly long passage through Earth's atmosphere, [] and the Sun is sometimes faint enough to be viewed comfortably with the naked eye or safely with optics provided there is no risk of bright sunlight suddenly appearing through a break between clouds.

Hazy conditions, atmospheric dust, and high humidity contribute to this atmospheric attenuation. An optical phenomenon , known as a green flash , can sometimes be seen shortly after sunset or before sunrise. The flash is caused by light from the Sun just below the horizon being bent usually through a temperature inversion towards the observer. Light of shorter wavelengths violet, blue, green is bent more than that of longer wavelengths yellow, orange, red but the violet and blue light is scattered more, leaving light that is perceived as green.

Ultraviolet light from the Sun has antiseptic properties and can be used to sanitize tools and water. It also causes sunburn , and has other biological effects such as the production of vitamin D and sun tanning. Ultraviolet light is strongly attenuated by Earth's ozone layer , so that the amount of UV varies greatly with latitude and has been partially responsible for many biological adaptations, including variations in human skin color in different regions of the globe.

The Sun has eight known planets.

The Solar System also has at least five dwarf planets , an asteroid belt , numerous comets , and a large number of icy bodies which lie beyond the orbit of Neptune. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the star. For other uses, see Sun disambiguation.

More help, more resources, more learning.

For other uses, see The Sun disambiguation. Star at the centre of the Solar System. Sun with sunspots and limb darkening as seen in visible light with solar filter. Corona and Coronal loop.

Fun Facts About Our Sun

Stellar magnetic field , Sunspots , List of solar cycles , and Solar phenomena. Butterfly diagram showing paired sunspot pattern. Graph is of sunspot area. Formation and evolution of the Solar System and Stellar evolution. Faint young Sun paradox. The Sun in culture. One billion is 10 9 , or 1,,, Bacteria instead use sulfur compounds as an energy source, via chemosynthesis.

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Formation & evolution

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Earth's Sun: Facts About the Sun's Age, Size and History

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Retrieved 15 July Matter from the corona is blown off as the solar wind.

Earth's Sun: Facts About the Sun's Age, Size and History

The strength of the sun's magnetic field is typically only about twice as strong as Earth's field. However, it becomes highly concentrated in small areas, reaching up to 3, times stronger than usual. These kinks and twists in the magnetic field develop because the sun spins more rapidly at the equator than at the higher latitudes and because the inner parts of the sun rotate more quickly than the surface.

These distortions create features ranging from sunspots to spectacular eruptions known as flares and coronal mass ejections. Flares are the most violent eruptions in the solar system, while coronal mass ejections are less violent but involve extraordinary amounts of matter — a single ejection can spout roughly 20 billion tons 18 billion metric tons of matter into space. 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, of helium, of oxygen, of carbon, of neon, of nitrogen, 40 of magnesium, 35 of iron and 35 of silicon. Still, hydrogen is the lightest of all elements, so it only accounts for roughly 72 percent of the sun's mass, while helium makes up about 26 percent.

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 sunspots or clusters of sunspots and then back to a minimum, is known as the solar cycle, and averages about 11 years long.

At the end of a cycle, the magnetic field rapidly reverses its polarity. 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 ancient Greek scholar Ptolemy formalizing this "geocentric" model in B. Then, in , Nicolaus Copernicus described a heliocentric, sun-centered model of the solar system, and in , Galileo Galilei 's discovery of Jupiter's moons revealed that not all heavenly bodies circled the Earth.

To learn more about how the sun and other stars work, after early observations using rockets, scientists began studying the sun from Earth orbit. Seven of them were successful, and analyzed the sun at ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths and photographed the super-hot corona, among other achievements. One of the most important solar missions to date has been the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory SOHO , which was designed to study the solar wind, as well as the sun's outer layers and interior structure.

It has imaged the structure of sunspots below the surface, measured the acceleration of the solar wind, discovered coronal waves and solar tornadoes, found more than 1, comets, and revolutionized our ability to forecast space weather. Recently, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory SDO , the most advanced spacecraft yet designed to study the sun, has returned never-before-seen details of material streaming outward and away from sunspots, as well as extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's surface and the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

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