It’s a Fact
About 1,300,000 planets the size of earth could be packed into the sun.
The bright giant
Millions of miles (kilometers) out in space there is a gigantic ball of
hot, glowing gas we call the sun.
The sun is actually a star. It is the closest star to us. Its official
name is Sol, which was the name of the ancient Roman sun god. From the
name Sol comes our word solar, which means “of the sun.”
The sun is enormous! At least 1,300,000 planets the size of earth could
be packed into it. And there would be room left over. And yet, big as
the sun is, many other stars are much, much bigger.
Although it is big, the sun looks small. That’s because it is so far
away. It is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the
earth. It takes light
from the sun about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to cross that enormous
distance and reach our world. And light is the fastest moving of all
things.
The sun is tremendously hot. The hotter a thing is, the more brightly it
glows. The sun glows so fiercely that we can’t look straight at it, even
though it is so far away. But the sun is not actually burning. It
isn’t a ball of fire. It’s a ball of gas, squeezed together so tightly
that its center is actually solid. This makes the center tremendously
hot. It is really a kind of giant atomic furnace in which the
temperature is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15,000,000°
Celsius)!
Energy pours up from inside the sun to the surface. The surface is a
boiling, bubbling mass from which great spouts of glowing gas leap
up—sometimes as much as a million miles (1,609,000 kilometers) into
space!
the sun
The sun is a star. It is a giant ball of gas squeezed together so
tightly that it is tremendously hot.
