Last updated on April 17th, 2024
Facts about Sun’s appearance
62. The sun is actually a mixture of ALL colors, which appears to the eye as white.
63. It seems to be several different colors during the day due to a phenomenon known as atmospheric scattering.
64. A green flash is a short lived optical illusion that sometimes occurs at sunrise or sunset when the light from the sun is bent towards the viewer.
65. It is as bright as 4 trillion trillion 100-watt light bulbs.
66. Partial solar eclipses are dangerous to the naked eye because our pupils are not accustomed to that level of contrast in light.
67. The sun is the closest thing to a perfect sphere that has been observed in nature.
68. Some parts of the sun are cooler than others and thus appear to be darker. They are called sunspots.
69. Sun spots have a very strong magnet field, which prevents the convection of energy, and thus accounts for their lower temperatures.
70. In fact, the sun is about 400 times larger than the moon.
Sun’s movement
71. It travels at 20 kilometers per second relative to other stars, and 220 kilometers per second around the Milky Way.
72. Different parts of the sun rotate at different speeds, the fastest being at its equator.
73. It completes a revolution around the entire galaxy once every 250 million years.
74. Its composition is 91% Hydrogen, 7.8% Helium, and 1% other gases.
About the Sun’s atmosphere
75. The Sun does not have a solid surface, what we see is the photosphere, which is the first layer of the Sun’s atmosphere.
76. The surface of the Sun is extremely active. It is possible to see sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, caused by changes in the magnetic field.
77. Sunspots are visible traits on the Sun’s photosphere. They are relatively colder regions caused by an increase in the magnetic field of the area. They usually appear in pairs, each with magnetic fields pointing in opposite directions.
78. The sunspots visible on the Sun’s photosphere consist of a dark, colder region called “umbra”, surrounded by a lighter, hotter region called “penumbra”.
79. The sunspots on the photosphere of the Sun are colder areas created because the magnetic field gets so strong that it prevents the heat within the sun from reaching the surface.
80. The Sun can be divided into different regions: the interior, including the core, the radiative zone, and the convection zone; and the atmosphere, including the photosphere, chromosphere, transition zone, and corona.
81. The photosphere is the deepest layer of the Sun that can be observed “directly”, and is what we usually refer to as its surface. It is so bright, that it makes impossible to see the chromosphere and corona above it.
82. The corona is the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere. It is composed of plasma escaping from the Sun. It is only visible when a total eclipse occurs, and it looks pearly white.
83. It contains different layers with varying temperatures; the corona, photosphere, chromosphere, and the core.
84. The chromosphere contains spikes of gas called spicules.
85. It is visible as a flash of color at the starting and ending of total solar eclipses.
86. The photosphere is the opaque layer of gas that makes the sun appear to be solid.
87. It’s also responsible for emitting light, and is cooler than the outer most layer, the corona.
88. The transition region is a very narrow (60 miles / 100 km) layer between the chromosphere and the corona where the temperature rises abruptly from about 8000 to about 500,000 K.
89. The corona releases a stream of charged particles referred to as solar wind.
Did you know?
Rainbows occur when the light coming from the Sun is refracted by raindrops. The sunlight splits into different wavelengths forming a spectrum that goes from red to violet.
Halos, sunbows, or sundogs, are created when the light coming from the Sun is refracted by ice crystals present in the clouds. The light is separated into different wavelengths forming a spectrum from red to violet.