It’s fun to discover astronomy facts about the sun, including information about its different layers and how it creates sunlight. You’re never too old to learn interesting things about the world around us and space.
The sun is an enormous ball of hot gas and plasma – about 74 percent hydrogen and 25 percent helium with trace amounts of other elements. Nuclear reactions at the centre of the sun fuse hydrogen into helium to produce energy. The hydrogen and helium then escape the core into the Radiative Zone and Convective Zone, where they radiate energy in waves that we see as sunlight.
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These waves move outward from the sun in a continuous, glowing atmosphere called the Corona. This is the area that we can see during a total solar eclipse or with a specialised type of telescope called a coronagraph. When the sun experiences magnetic storms, this can cause a flare – which is a sudden release of energy that can give off bright bursts of ultraviolet, infrared and X-ray radiation.
The sun is 109 times wider than Earth and 330,000 times as massive, so it could easily swallow the planets and moons of our Solar System. It is middle-aged compared to the billions of other stars in our galaxy. The Sun’s gravity holds the planets in their orbits and it will continue to burn hydrogen at its core until it runs out of fuel in 5 billion years. After that, it will change radically and begin burning helium and will be a Red Dwarf.