Tuesday, March 10, 2015

You really aren't that big of a deal

  1. The Sun is 864,400 miles (1,391,000 kilometers) across. This is about109 times the diameter of Earth. The Sun weighs about 333,000 times as much as Earth. It is so large that about 1,300,000 planet Earths can fit inside of it.  

  2. The innermost layer of the sun is the core. With a temperature of 15 million kelvins (27 million degrees Fahrenheit)
  3. The outermost layer of the sun is the corona. Only visible during eclipses, it is a low density cloud of plasma with higher transparency than the inner layers. The white corona is a million times less bright than the inner layers of the sun, but is many times larger. The corona is hotter than some of the inner layers. Its average temperature is 1 million K (2 million degrees F) but in some places it can reach 3 million K (5 million degrees F). 

  4. Temperatures steadily decrease as we move farther away from the core, but after the photosphere they begin to rise again. There are several theories that explain this, but none have been proven.


    In the corona, above sunspots and areas of complex magnetic field patterns, are solar flares. These sparks of energy sometimes reach the size of the Earth and can last for up to several hours. Their temperature has been recorded at 11 million K (20 million degrees F). The extreme heat produces x rays that create light when they hit the gases of the corona.

  5. The sun is the source of virtually all heat for our planet.  The earth is insignificant in comparison.  
  6. If you want to feel even more insignificant, this guy ran a program to prove that every human alive would fit into one 900-meter ball.  

  7. And yet if our politicians are to be believed, our failure to give them more control over the energy economy is boiling the planet.  
  8. Seriously, people....  It's time to get over yourselves.  It's the sun, and the occasional lack of it.  You aren't that big of a deal.  Go here for more fun details.  

1 comment:

Steve D said...

'The sun is the source of virtually all heat for our planet.'

This isn't correct. The vast majority of the Earth's heat is inside it, and comes from the radioactive decay of heavy elements; mostly thorium and uranium. They didn't come from the sun, they came from a super nova millions of years ago.