Our sun named “Sol” named after the roman god of the sun is yellow dwarf star with a radius of 695,700km and a temperature ranging from 5,973°C to 15,000,000°C. It is the giver of life on earth and eventually will become the destroyer, if we the human race lives long enough to see it.
What is our sun made of?
Our sun is about 4.6 billion years old and is made up of a mixture of gas and plasma, around 91% of it is hydrogen gas that is turned into helium by the intense heat and pressure of the sun.
When the sun super heats the plasma it can contain so much energy that it’s charged particles can escape the suns gravity and blow out into space in the form of solar winds that often hit earth. These solar winds are responsible for auroras like the northern lights.
The goldilocks zone
Our solar system contains eight planets one of them of courses being our planet Earth Which is the only planet in our system in the goldilocks zone. The goldilocks zone refers to a zone in space that is the perfect distance from a solar systems star to not be to hot or to cold for liquid water to exist.
The reason this is important is because liquid water is a key ingredient in creating life on other worlds, because Mars is too far away it is to cold and because Venus is to close it’s too hot. Other planets with that could sustain life are known as exoplanets, there are 5,059 of these planets currently discovered in 3,733 systems.
Solar storms from our sun
Unfortunately for us humans the sun can cause the world as we know it to collapse in matter of minutes. Solar storms is a term used when the Sun emits a massive amount of energy in the from of solar flares and coronal mass ejections which are basically huge explosions more powerful than a billion nuclear bombs. When these storms hit earth they have the ability to disrupt or take down modern electronics from satellites to radios. It isn’t hard to imagine what type of effect the worlds electrical infrastructure all crashing at once would have on the human race as a whole. The biggest concern is that since the world has become much more reliant on technology for navigation, health care, business, government, law enforcement etc and the fact we have not yet been tested by a solar storm means when our luck runs out and one does it, it will be a catastrophe for mankind.
Now onto a more light hearted subject, the death of the sun that’s impossible to stop and that will probably kill us all.
The death of the sun and destruction of Earth
The sun is constantly burning fuel and emitting energy but this fuel is not unlimited and eventually it will run out causing the death of the sun as we know it. Try not to get to worried since the sun is expanding very slowly and is not expected to burn up all oxygen in Earths atmosphere and destroy life for around another billion years but it is an inevitability and unless we humans find away off this planet we will be toast.
In about 5 billion years all the suns fuel will run out and it will have expanded into a red giant consuming Mercury and Venus boiling off all water on Earth leaving it a scorched planet. Since scientists aren’t sure how large the sun will become it is hard to know if the earth will spiral into it or not but if it does manage to survive it will orbit our dead sun for the rest of it’s life as our star shrinks to a white dwarf and eventually a black dwarf that will collide with earth marking the end for our beloved planet.
The only hope of saving Earth would be to somehow eject it from our solar system. Who knows maybe this will become possible with rocket technology in the future so we can literally push our planet away from the suns gravity our maybe another solar system will collide with ours leaving a small chance that earth will escape the chaos either way only time will tell and thankfully it will be long after you and I are dead!
