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The Sun is 1.4 million kilometers (4.643 light-seconds) wide, about 109 times wider than Earth, or four times the Lunar distance, and contains 99.86% of all Solar System mass. The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star that makes up about 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System. [26]
Thus, the Sun occupies 0.00001% (1 part in 10 7) of the volume of a sphere with a radius the size of Earth's orbit, whereas Earth's volume is roughly 1 millionth (10 −6) that of the Sun. Jupiter, the largest planet, is 5.2 AU from the Sun and has a radius of 71,000 km (0.00047 AU; 44,000 mi), whereas the most distant planet, Neptune, is 30 AU ...
Earth orbits the Sun, making Earth the third-closest planet to the Sun and part of the inner Solar System. Earth's average orbital distance is about 150 million km (93 million mi), which is the basis for the astronomical unit (AU) and is equal to roughly 8.3 light minutes or 380 times Earth's distance to the Moon .
[121] [122] Within 7.5 billion years, the Sun will have expanded to a radius of 1.2 AU (180 × 10 ^ 6 km; 110 × 10 ^ 6 mi)—256 times its current size. At the tip of the red-giant branch , as a result of the vastly increased surface area, the Sun's surface will be much cooler (about 2,600 K (2,330 °C; 4,220 °F)) than now, and its luminosity ...
In 1908 Shuman formed the Sun Power Company with the intent of building larger solar power plants. He, along with his technical advisor A.S.E. Ackermann and British physicist Sir Charles Vernon Boys , [ 24 ] developed an improved system using mirrors to reflect solar energy upon collector boxes, increasing heating capacity to the extent that ...
The core contains 34% of the Sun's mass, but only 3% of the Sun's volume, and it generates 99% of the fusion power of the Sun. There are two distinct reactions in which four hydrogen nuclei may eventually result in one helium nucleus: the proton–proton chain reaction – which is responsible for most of the Sun's released energy – and the ...
The solar transition region is a region of the Sun's atmosphere between the upper chromosphere and corona. [1] [2] It is important because it is the site of several unrelated but important transitions in the physics of the solar atmosphere:
Aristarchus of Samos had speculated about heliocentrism in Ancient Greece; Martianus Capella taught in the early Middle Ages that both Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun, while the Moon, the Sun and the other planets orbit the Earth; [10] in Al-Andalus, Arzachel proposed that Mercury orbits the Sun, and heliocentric astronomers worked in the ...