Sun Encounters

Unless you’re slapping on sunscreen on a hot day, you probably don’t think much about the sun. Every eight minutes, light travels from our sun to the Earth. This would mean if the star magically disappeared, it would take 8 minutes for us to notice.
Most of us take the sun forgranted. If the sun were a human being (not God, christian readers), scientists calculate it would take one million years to do one days work as the sun.

The date of discovery is unknown, but they say that it was found by our ancient ncestors. The size is 109.2 times larger than our earth, but don’t think that’s big. The mass is 1,989,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg!
The Sun is a ball of superheated material. A diagram of the star would be far too complicated, so we’ve decided to give you a list of features.

• The magnetic field constantly moves and twists, shooting out loops of gas from the surface. This and its immense gravity pull the solar system together.The corona (not the virus) is the sun’s outer layer. The hottest of them all, plasma temperatures can reach up to 17,000,000 degrees celcius.
• The chromosphere is the second layer of the sun’s atmosphere. Strangely, it is much hotter than the surface.
• The photosphere is the visable surface of the sun. The top of this solid layer can reach temperatures of 5,500 degrees celcius, hot enough to boil metals, but cold compared to the rest.The convective zone houses large bubbles of hot material welling upwards, like gloopy blobs in a lava lamp.
• Light escaping from the core gets trapped in the radiation zone. It can take more than 10,000 years to find its way back out.
• The core is a high-pressure nuclear reactor, which reaches 15 million degrees celcius. Inside, hydrogen atoms are smashed together, creating helium atoms and releasing energy.
• As well as heat and light, the sun guives off constant streams of material. This solar wind is made of electrically charged particles known as high-energy. This is driven out from the corona .
• This wind streaks across the solar system at speed, 500 miles per sercond to be precise. Even though they are smaller than atoms, the particles slam into every object in their path. Earth lies deep in the danger zone of solar wind, but luckily our magnetic field protects us.
• Solar flares are gigantic explosions on the surface of the sun. They blast a lot of material into space. If this hits the earth, it can cause disruption to our electrical equipment, so scientists pay close attention to the sun.

Packed with $3,000,000 of cutting edge technology, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter promise to let us ‘touch the sun’ Launched on August 12 2018, this was the first time a NASA spacecraft was named after a living person, honoring physicist Eugene Parker. A memory card having the names of over 1.1 million people was mounted on a plaque and installed below the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna on May 18, 2018.

The card also contains photos of Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, and a copy of his 1958 scientific paper.

Also on the ship is some really cool technology. A hexagonal shield, mounted on the sun facing side of the ship, is made to withstand temperatures of about 1,370 °C (2,500 °F). A white reflective alumina surface layer minimizes absorption. The spacecraft systems and scientific instruments are located in the central portion of the shield’s shadow, where direct radiation from the Sun is fully blocked.