Questions and Answers
Here you will find answers to questions about the Sun. If you have a question about the Sun and do not find it listed here you can ask the “I Love My Sun” team. You will receive a reply to your question and your question and the answer will thereafter be displayed below.
How old is the Sun?
The Sun is approximately 4.5 billion years old and is expected to continue for another 5 billion years.
How big is the Sun?
A: The Sun’s radius is 109 times bigger than the radius of the Earth which is 6.376km. It is the largest object in the Solar System.
How far away is the Sun from Earth?
The distance between the Sun and Earth is 150 million km. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 380.000 km.It still took the astronauts from Apollo 4 days to fly to the moon. How many days would it take to fly to the sun?
What is the mass of the Sun?
The Sun has 99.85% of all the mass in our Solar System. It weighs 2 billion billion billion tons (or 2.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 kg) which is 330.000 times the mass of Earth.
What is the temperature of the Sun?
The temperature of a stove element is about 550°C, the flame of a burning match is between 600 and 900°C hot, the fire in the fireplace at home reaches almost 2.000°C, but in the core of the Sun the temperature rises to an amazing 15.000.000°C. At the surface of the Sun it is about 6.000°C. The temperature then rises again and can reach well over 1.000.000°C in the solar corona.
What heats the Sun?
The center of an atom is called the nucleus. When two atoms come together, and their nuclei combine, you have nuclear fusion [nuclei: plural of nucleus]. The energy of the Sun is produced by nuclear fusion reactions. This is because the core of the Sun is very hot and the density is very high. The Sun fuses 600 million tons of hydrogen into 595 million tons of helium per second.
What is a plasma?
There are four well-known states of matter. The most common are solid, liquid and gas. Matter on Earth has electrons that orbit around the atom's nucleus. However, when temperatures get very hot, the electrons can escape out of their orbit. When electrons are no longer trapped in orbits around the nucleus, we have what is called the plasma state. Stars, such as our Sun, are made up of material in the plasma state.
How big is a sunspot?
Most sunspots range in size from about 1.500 km to around 50,000 km in diameter. Therefore, many sunspots are as large as Earth!
What is a coronal mass ejection?
Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are explosions in the solar corona. As much as 10.000.000.000.000 kg of material can be ejected into the solar wind.
What is the solar wind?
The solar wind is a stream of particles that is blown into space. It is constantly produced by the Sun.