The next time you get burned red from being outside too long, spare a thought for how powerful that ball of energy is that dominates the daytime sky.
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The Sun produces poem-worthy sunsets and as much energy as one trillion megaton bombs every second. Wow, that’s raw untapped power!
The Sun is a star, just like the other stars we see at night, and it’s big.
The Sun would hold the earth a million times over and it’s been ‘burning’ for almost five billion years.
Hang on, we say the Sun burns, but it doesn’t burn like wood burns.
Instead, the sun is a gigantic nuclear reactor.
The temperature at the surface of the Sun is about 5600 Celsius, in the centre a whopping 15 million Celsius.
Feeling sweaty yet?
Want to see sunspots for yourself this weekend?
It’s easy. Just punch a hole through a piece of thin cardboard with a large knitting needle, point it at the Sun and hold a sheet of white A4 paper below. Sunspots will appear.
Another safe way is to turn your back to the Sun and holding your binoculars outstretched with one hand, aim them at the Sun.
See the image projected back onto a screen, wall, or large piece of white paper that you're holding in your free hand.
It should be situated about 30 centimetres from the binoculars' eyepiece.
Just move the binoculars around until the sunspots appear sharp, but don’t look at the Sun directly, OK?
Ever wondered what would happen if the Sun suddenly disappeared?
We’d have no idea it had gone for 8.5 minutes.
We’d still see it as an eerie sight, lingering, like a ghost in the sky.
Just imagine, nobody on earth could predict what was about to happen.
And there’s no way of protecting yourself from it.
As soon as the last of the sun’s light reached us eight-and-a-half minutes after the sun itself disappeared, the sun would blink out and night would fall over the entire Earth.
Not until that instant would Earth sail off in a straight line into space.
Sleep well tonight.
