Over one million Earths could easily fit inside this gargantuan ball of bubbling gas with core temperatures reaching more than sixteen million degrees Celsius. The Sun is approximately ninety-three million miles away. The Universe s5e8: Dark Future of Our Sun, 2010
A colossal nuclear reactor comprised of three-quarters hydrogen – the rest mostly helium with traces of heavier elements ... This process called Fusion gives off radiant energy. ibid.
Our sun is an average star. There are stars one hundred times its mass. ibid.
Strangely, our sun is 30% brighter than it was at birth. As it ages it will gradually grow even brighter and more powerful. ibid.
It will run out of hydrogen fuel in its core. ibid.
A red giant is a star that has exhausted its primary reservoir of hydrogen fuel at its core. ibid.
Scientists look at the portent of solar activity – sun spots. They come and go in an eleven-year cycle following changes in the Sun’s magnetic field. Darker, cooler patches where a locally strong magnetic field prevents each from rising. Prominences – huge arching columns of gas often hanging above sunspots supported by the Sun’s magnetic field. Solar Empire: A Star is Born, Discovery 2001
About five billion years from now it will come to the end of its hydrogen fuel ... An expanding vermilion Sun. A red giant of hot gasses pushing out into space. ibid.
Early man’s sense of wonder at the sun’s immense powers led naturally to belief in a sun-god. In different forms they are found in the pantheons of many early cultures. Solar Empire: Heavens Above
Eclipses are a consequence of cosmic alignments when the sun, moon and Earth fall precisely into line. ibid.
At the nuclear heart it’s seventeen million degrees ... Massive filaments, loops of gas arching up over the surface ... Prominences: they curve up big enough to girdle the Earth ... Yet there’s a force that stops itself blowing itself to pieces: gravity. It’s strong enough to keep the nuclear monster in check. Our Secret Sun, Discovery 2002
Magnetism: That’s what shapes the Sun. The patterns we see on the Sun are the same as the magnetic lines round a magnet on Earth. ibid.
The sun-spots look dark because they are cooler than the rest of the Sun. Spots form where the magnetism is strongest. ibid.
It’s so huge that more than a million Earths would fit inside it ... But our Sun is also violent and volatile, and becoming more dangerous as it ages. It will get hotter and thousands of times brighter, evaporate away our oceans, melt the surface of the planet and make life on Earth impossible. Death of the Sun, 2006
The capsule hit the ground at over three hundred kilometres an hour. It split open and the priceless wafers shattered into thousands of pieces. For the members of the Genesis team it was disaster ... The whole sample weighed no more than a few grains of salt. The team successfully extracted the first atoms. ibid.
The Sun sings. ibid.
New magnetic fields are constantly being created because rivers of plasma which are electrically charged flow at different speeds around the Sun. The Sun’s rotation tangles these magnetic lines together forcing parts of them to emerge on the surface as dark spots and prominences that stick out from the surface. ibid.
Solar flares release a cascade of high energy particles known as protons. Protons can pass through the human body potentially causing chromosome damage and even cancer. ibid.
Super-flares are up to ten million times more energetic than the most powerful solar flares. They can last for up to a week and cause stars to shine one thousand times more brightly than normal. ibid.
Pressure at the core will drop as the fuel is burnt. This lower pressure will no longer hold the forces of gravity at bay. Gravity will compress the core, heating the hydrogen more and making the fuel burn even faster. This will increase the pressure coming from the core. The two forces will balance once again. ibid.
Scientists found that a quarter of the sun was in fact helium. Which was considerably more than they thought. They realised that to fuse that amount of helium would mean the sun would have to be burning at billions of degrees. But the truth was the sun only burns at fifteen million degrees ... Per cubic metre the sun actually generates less heat than a human being. Jim Al-Khalili, Atom: The Key to the Cosmos, BBC 2008
Chinese astronomers were among the first to record the sun’s behaviour some 2,800 years ago. They noted that dark patches sometimes appeared on its surface and then disappeared. Jim Al-Khalili, Secrets of the Solar System II: Sun & Mercury, PBS 2020
Hale established that there were strong magnetic fields in sunspots on the Sun’s surface. ibid.
‘If it’s that hot, why does the gas stay on the Sun?’ ibid. Matthew Genge, planetary scientist
[Eugene] Parker thought differently: ‘I realised that we had a supersonic expansion of the outer atmosphere of the Sun.’ ibid.
‘A Carrington-level event has been predicted now to cause trillions of dollars worth of damage, could wipe out power-grids.’ ibid. planetary scientist
The sun is four hundred times the diameter of the moon, but by sheer coincidence it is four hundred times further away from the Earth. Brian Cox: Wonders of the Solar System, BBC 2010
The fusion of hydrogen into helium is the foundation of all the sun’s power. ibid.
Sun spots: some of these vast structures are large enough to engulf the entire Earth ... The greater the number of sun spots the more powerful our star becomes ... We’ve discovered the sun has seasons. ibid.
The sun is going into overdrive: our star is more active now than it’s been for a decade. The Secret Life of the Sun, BBC 2013
In 2006 NASA launched the twin stereo space-craft to observe the sun from two sides simultaneously. ibid.
So what causes these solar cycles? ibid.
The sun like the earth spins on its axis. ibid.
The cycles themselves could be changing. ibid.
The sun also holds a dark secret: some day it will bake the Earth in a fiery holocaust. Can we move to a new home in the Cosmos? ... Can we survive the death of the Sun? Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman s4e3: Can We Survive the Death of the Sun? Science 2013
After the Sun destroys Earth, it burns helium for two billion years, runs out of fuel and collapses into a tiny dim white dwarf star. ibid.
Back in the seventeenth century there was a fifty-year period in which there didn’t appear to be any sun spots at all ... the Little Ice Age. Iain Stewart, Earth: Climate Wars: Fightback, BBC 2008
Especially when an event like a solar maximum occurs. That’s when massive eruptions from the sun’s surface send billions of charged particles into space some of which reach the Earth. Now events like this don’t happen all the time but solar scientists say there’s one just around the corner. And it poses a major threat. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, interview Stephen Hawking's Brave New World
These events are known as Coronal Mass Ejections. ibid.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. ibid.
… Some folks call her a runaway.
A failure in the race.
But she knows where her ticket takes her.
She will find her place in the sun.
And she’ll fly, fly, fly … Tracy Chapman, She’s Got Her Ticket
If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire. Michael Sims, Apollo’s Fire
June suns, you cannot store them
To warm the winter’s cold,
The lad that hopes for heaven
Shall fill his mouth with mould. A E Housman, More Poems
In the midst of all dwells the Sun. For who could set this luminary in another or better place in this most glorious temple, than whence he can at one and the same time brighten the whole. Nicolaus Copernicus
The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
The sun just touched the morning;
The morning, happy thing,
Supposed that he had come to dwell,
And life would be all spring. Emily Dickinson
Wake! For the Sun, who scatter’d into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav’n, and strikes
The Sultan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light. Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
The sun, – the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man – burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist