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What do we know about the star at the centre of our Solar System ?
Our sun
( The Greeks called it Helios and the Romans called it in Latin
Sol ) is a G2 type star or a yellow star. The sun has a diameter
of 1.39 million kilometres and over 500 times the mass of all the
other objects in the Solar System, including all the planets and
their moons.
To put the suns size in perspective, it has as much mass as 1.3
million Earths, 75% of this mass is Hydrogen and 24% Helium. The
sun is incredibly hot, it's core is approximately 15 million °C
and its surface temperature is approximately 6000°C. The Sun
produces 386 billion billion megawatts every single second, this
stupendous energy output is achieved by the conversion by nuclear
fusion of 700 million tons of Hydrogen every second. The sun is a
middle aged star, about 4.5 Billion years old and has ample fuel
for another 5 Billion years.
Where is our Solar
System ?
It is situated
in one of the outer spiral arms of the Galaxy called " The Milky
Way ", it is positioned 28,000 light years from the Milky Ways
Galactic Centre. The coordinates of the Centre of Milky Way for
our current Century is - Right ascension 17 hours, 45.6 minutes,
Declination -28 degrees 56 minutes, at a distance of 28 light
years, Relative to the Planet Earth.
How big is The Milky
Way ?
The Milky Way
is NOT just BIG it's VERY BIG. The Milky Way Consists of 200 to 400 billion stars and probably
in excess of a Trillion times the mass of our own Solar System.
The Milky Way is a disc shape with spiralling arms, If we were
able to travel at the speed of light, it
would take approximately 100,000 years to cross from one side to the other. |