Interesting Facts About the Sun

Interesting Facts About the Sun

Every morning the sun rises, bringing light and warmth to our world.
It is daytime.
The sun rises in the east, and during the day it appears to travel in an arc across the sky.
In the evening, it sets in the west.
As it disappears below the horizon, the earth becomes dark.
It is night.
However, this is not really what happens.
The sun only seems to move across the sky. It is the earth, not the sun,  that is moving.
The earth is spinning in space.
The sun moves into our view and out of sight again as the earth whirls around.

It takes the earth 24 hours to turn around an imaginary line that runs from the North Pole to the South Pole. We call this line the earth's axis.

Without the sun's light and heat, the earth would be a dark, cold world. 
Plants need sunlight to make their food.
Animals cannot make their own food. They must eat plants or other animals in order to live.

So without sunlight, there would be no living things.

What is the sun?

The sun is a star and is similar to the other stars in the sky. It appears bigger and brighter because it is much nearer than other stars.

The sun lies about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away.
The star nearest to us after the sun is over 25 million million miles (40 million million kilometers) away!

Heat from the sun warms the earth. The highest temperature recorded on earth was 136 °F (58 °C).

The temperature near the surface of the sun is 10,000 °F (5500 °C)!
At the sun's center, the temperature rises to about 27,000,000 °F (15,000,000 °C).

Sometimes we can see dark patches on the surface of the sun.
These are called sunspots.
We may also see arcs of gas called prominences or bursts of light called flares.
Prominences and flares are types of solar storms.
They usually happen above sunspots.

Scaling the sun