The+Sun

By Suraj R
==It's hot enough to melt any metal. It's so far away it takes eight minutes for it's light to reach your eyes.If it was a hollow ball, it would fit more than 1,000,000 Earths. Do you know what it is? It's the Sun!==



==Our sun is a star located at the center of our solar system. It's a huge ball of hot spinning gases and nuclear reactions that lights up he Earth. The sun isn't very large compared to other stars in the universe, but to us it looks much bigger because it's closer to us. The sun is very hot. It's surface temperature is about 9,900 C (5,500 F)==

==The sun was born in a vast cloud of gas and dust around 5 billion years ago. Over a period of millions of years this gas and dust fell into a common center of the force of gravity.As it falls inward it generates a tremendous amount of heat and pressure. As it grows the baby sun gets hotter and hotter. Eventually when the temperature reached about 1 million degrees. It's core ignited, causing it to begin nuclear fusion. When this happened, the sun began producing its own light, heat and energy.==

Nuclear fusion is a process in which stars burn a fuel known as hydrogen, resulting the creation of another type of matter called helium.
==Each second the sun converts 600,000,000 tons of hydrogen. In these fusion reactions, the sun loses 4 million tons of mass each second. The sun will run out of fuel in about 5 billion years. When this happens It will explode into a planetary nebula a giant shell of gas, that will destroy all planets in our solar system including Earth.== =__ Features of the Sun __=

 ﻿ -Sun spots
==﻿ ﻿ ﻿ ﻿ We don't often think of the sun as having cooler areas on it's surface. Even though sun is too hot for an astronaut to visit, there are areas which are slightly cooler. These are called sunspots and they appear slightly darker in color. they generally increase in intensity and then decrease in aperiod of 11 years. This 11 year cycle is called the Saros Cycle.==

-Solar flares
==﻿ A solar flare is a violent eruption from sun's photosphere. This realeases a massive amount of gas and plasma into sun's atmosphere. They interact with Earth's magnetic fields to create beautiful light shows know as the northern and southern lights.==

Solar Wind
==As the sun burns in it's core (center) it releases huge amounts of atomic particles. These particle, along with the sun's radiation creates a sort of wind, known as solar wind. Eventually this wind reaches beyond our solar system and mix with the winds from other stars The area of space where the winds aretoo week to spread and mix with the winds of other stars is called interstellar medium.==

The Core is the center of the Sun. The Sun has tremendously high temperature and pressure. The temperature is roughly 15 million C.
== -__The Radiative zone__ The Radiative Zone is the layer outside of the core. The temperature of the radiative zone ranges from 15 million to 1 million C. __The Convective Zone__ The convective zone is the layer outside of the Radiative Zone. The temperature ranges from 1 million to 6,000 C. Animals, plants and humans need the sun to live. Without the sun plants can't make food. With out plants herbivores can't live. And lastly carnivores can't live without herbivores to eat. Almost all living things need the sun to live. Without the sun Earh would not even exist. ==