Bright sunlight is a source of excellent mood and cheerfulness. In cloudy weather, many people feel depressed, succumb to depression. Despite this, everyone knows that the bad weather will end soon and the sun will appear in the sky. It has been familiar to people since childhood, and few people think about what this luminary is. The most famous information about the Sun is that it is a star. However, there are many more interesting facts that may be of interest to both children and adults.

What is the Sun?

Now everyone knows that the Sun is a star, and not a huge resembling a planet. It is a cloud of gases with a core inside. The main component of this star is hydrogen, which occupies about 92% of its total volume. Approximately 7% is accounted for by helium, and the remaining percentage is divided among other elements. These include iron, oxygen, nickel, silicon, sulfur and others.

Most of a star's energy comes from the fusion of helium from hydrogen. Information about the Sun, collected by scientists, allows us to attribute it to the G2V type according to the spectral classification. This type is called a "yellow dwarf". At the same time, the sun, contrary to popular belief, shines with white light. The yellow glow appears as a result of scattering and absorption by the atmosphere of our planet of the short-wavelength part of the spectrum of its rays. Our luminary - the Sun - is integral part galaxy From its center, the star is at a distance of 26,000 light years, and one revolution around it takes 225-250 million years.

solar radiation

The Sun and Earth are separated by a distance of 149,600 km. Despite this, solar radiation is the main source of energy on the planet. Not all of its volume passes through the Earth's atmosphere. The energy of the Sun is used by plants in the process of photosynthesis. In this way, various organic compounds are formed and oxygen is released. Solar radiation is also used to generate electricity. Even the energy of peat reserves and other minerals appeared in ancient times under the influence of the rays of this bright star. The ultraviolet radiation of the Sun deserves special attention. It has antiseptic properties and can be used to disinfect water. It also affects the biological processes in the human body, causing tanning on the skin, as well as the production of vitamin D.

Sun life cycle

Our luminary - the Sun - is a young star belonging to the third generation. It contains a large amount of metals, which indicates its formation from other stars of previous generations. According to scientists, the Sun is about 4.57 billion years old. Given that the life cycle of a star is 10 billion years, it is now in the middle of it. At this stage, thermonuclear fusion of helium from hydrogen occurs in the core of the Sun. Gradually, the amount of hydrogen will decrease, the star will become more and more hot, and its luminosity will be higher. Then the reserves of hydrogen in the core will run out completely, part of it will pass into the outer shell of the Sun, and helium will begin to condense. The processes of star extinction will continue for billions of years, but still lead to its transformation first into a red giant, then into a white dwarf.

sun and earth

Life on our planet will also depend on the degree of solar radiation. In about 1 billion years, it will be so strong that the surface of the Earth will heat up significantly and become unsuitable for most life forms, they can only remain in the depths of the oceans and in the polar latitudes. By the age of the Sun at about 8 billion years, the conditions on the planet will be close to those that are now on Venus. There will be no water at all, it will all evaporate into space. This will lead to complete disappearance. different forms life. As the core of the Sun contracts and its outer shell increases, the probability of absorption of our planet by the outer layers of the star's plasma will increase. This will not happen only if the Earth rotates around the Sun at a greater distance as a result of the transition to another orbit.

A magnetic field

Information about the Sun, collected by researchers, indicates that it is a magnetically active star. created by him, changes its direction every 11 years. Its intensity also varies over time. All these transformations are called solar activity, which is characterized by special phenomena, such as wind, flares. They are the cause and which adversely affect the operation of some devices on Earth, the well-being of people.

solar eclipses

Information about the Sun, collected by the ancestors and survived to this day, contains references to its eclipses since antiquity. A large number of them are also described in the Middle Ages. Solar eclipse is the result of the obscuration of a star by the Moon from an observer on Earth. It can be complete, when at least from one point of our planet the solar disk is completely hidden, and partial. There are usually two to five eclipses per year. At a certain point on the Earth, they occur with a time difference of 200-300 years. Fans of viewing the sky, the Sun can also see an annular eclipse. The moon covers the disk of the star, but due to its smaller diameter, it cannot completely outshine it. As a result, a “fiery” ring remains visible.

It is worth remembering that observing the Sun with the naked eye, especially with binoculars or a telescope, is very dangerous. This can lead to permanent visual impairment. The sun is relatively close to the surface of our planet and shines very brightly. Without a threat to eye health, you can look at it only during sunrises and sunsets. The rest of the time, you need to use special darkening filters or project an image obtained with a telescope onto a white screen. This method is the most acceptable.

Along with planets, satellites and asteroids, the solar system contains many thousands of small icy bodies - comets. Translated from ancient Greek, the word "comet" means "hairy, shaggy." The comet has a hazy appearance, usually like a huge snowball, and revolves around the Sun most often in elongated orbits.

Comets are usually named after the people who first observed them. The orbits of comets are much more elongated than those of planets. Therefore, they spend most of their time away from the Sun, only approaching it for a short time. When approaching the Sun, the comet heats up, melts and forms to whom(a cloud of dust and gas) and sometimes a tail of gas and dust. So there is nothing mysterious about the comet's tail.

Comets consist of a nucleus and a bright hazy shell surrounding it ( coma), consisting of gases and dust.
The solid central part of a comet is called core and consists of frozen gas and ice, dust particles and larger rocks. The comet's coma has an almost spherical shape and usually stretches from 100 thousand to 1.4 million km from the nucleus. And the tail in length can reach several million kilometers. The tails of comets do not have sharp outlines and are practically transparent - stars are clearly visible through them - as they are formed from an extremely rarefied substance. Man can observe comet tails only because the gas and dust glow. At the same time, the glow of the gas is associated with its ionization by ultraviolet rays and streams of particles ejected from the solar surface, and the dust simply scatters sunlight.

The theory of tails and forms of comets developed in late XIX century Russian astronomer Fedor Bredikhin(1831-1904). He also owns the classification of comet tails used in modern astronomy - three main types:
straight and narrow, directed directly from the Sun;
wide and slightly curved, deviating from the sun;
short, strongly deviated from the central luminary.

Some comets have highly inclined orbits with respect to other planets in the solar system, so that they are blown far up or down from the Sun and planets for thousands of years.

Type of comets

Most comets are less than 10 km across. But when they are near the Sun, they can sometimes be seen from Earth with the naked eye. They usually appear as small, dimly glowing specks, although occasionally a very bright comet appears with a long, silvery tail that cuts through the sky like a searchlight. Luminous tails of comets often split into individual jets and feathers with graceful curves and whorls. Comets can also have two tails: a straight blue gaseous tail that trails behind the comet and is always located away from the Sun, and another yellow, dusty tail that curves behind the comet, following exactly in its orbit.

Now scientists know for sure that comets are clusters dirty ice. But where do they come from? Perhaps they represent the stuff left over from the origin of the solar system. But this is only an assumption.

Are comets the same?

The time it takes a comet to complete its journey around the sun is called comet period. For some comets, this takes time from 3 to 150 years. Such comets are called periodic (short-period).
Other comets take millennia to make such a journey - they are called non-periodic (long-term). It is impossible to predict when a non-periodic comet will appear, because its previous appearance has not been recorded. Presumably, such comets fly to us from Oort clouds, which contains a huge number of cometary nuclei. Bodies located on the outskirts of the solar system, as a rule, consist of volatile substances (water, methane and other ices) that evaporate when approaching the Sun. Oort cloud - hypothetical a spherical region of the solar system that serves as a source of long-period comets. Instrumentally, the existence of the Oort cloud has not been confirmed, but many indirect facts point to its existence.

Comet designation

In 1994, the International Astronomical Union approved new system comet symbols. Now the name of the comet includes the year of discovery, the letter indicating the half of the month in which the discovery took place, and the number of the discovery in that half of the month. This system is similar to the one used for naming asteroids. Thus, the fourth comet, discovered in the second half of February 2006, receives the designation 2006 D4. The comet is preceded by a prefix indicating the nature of the comet. The following prefixes are used:
P/ is a short period comet (that is, a comet whose period is less than 200 years, or which has been observed in two or more perihelion passages);
C/ - long-period comet;
X/ - comet for which a reliable orbit could not be calculated (usually for historical comets);
D/ - comets collapsed or were lost;
A/ - objects that were mistaken for comets, but actually turned out to be asteroids.

Comets in relation to Earth

The masses of comets are negligible in relation to the mass of the Earth: they are about a billion times less than the mass of the Earth, and the density of matter from their tails is practically zero. Therefore, "heavenly guests" cannot affect the planets of the solar system. In May 1910, the Earth passed through the tail of Halley's comet, but there was no change in the motion of our planet.
On the other hand, a collision of a large comet with a planet can cause large-scale consequences in the Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere.

A bright star in the firmament of the Earth - how long will it shine on us, what surprises can it still present in addition to global warming, flares and magnetic storms carried by the solar wind? What will happen to our planet in thousands of years and in the foreseeable future? These questions are tirelessly asked by scientific minds, trying to gain new information about the infinite space around us and, especially, about the Sun, the source of life on Earth. NASA's Hubble observatories have been launched into space, each performing its own task of exploring the solar system and distant galaxies. NASA's powerful SDO telescope has been pointed at the Sun - it has recently been joined by the IRIS spectrograph, launched into low Earth orbit in 2013. IRIS monitors the activity of the Sun and captures changes in its atmosphere. Thanks to the unique capabilities of the observatory, scientists have received new information about the Sun, destroying some of their previous theoretical calculations and hypotheses.

Five interesting facts about the Sun, obtained on the basis of research by the IRIS observatory

The narrow transit region - a convective zone located in the lower layers of the atmosphere - between the surface of the Sun and its photosphere, turned out to be much more complicated in its structure and turbulence than scientists had previously assumed:

• The IRIS orbital observatory has identified thermal pockets in the lowest layers of the Sun's atmosphere with a temperature of 111,000 degrees - these are a kind of heat bombs that emit huge blobs of energy in extremely short intervals of time. The unexpected news caused not any surprise in the scientific community - it can clarify the understanding of the mechanism of heating of the entire solar envelope.
• IRIS discovered another new and interesting fact about the Sun: in the transitional (convective) zone, very low above the surface of the celestial body, numerous small loops of solar matter are formed - this information gives scientists a message to explain the principle of generating solar energy.
• The NASA observatory also discovered that the solar wind is initially formed in the form of high-speed plasma streams gushing out of coronal funnels or so-called dark spots - halo regions with a lower density of stellar matter.
• In the regions of solar activity on the solar envelope, IRIS recorded mini-tornadoes moving at a speed of 19.3 km per second and penetrating the chromosphere - they may transport energy from the surface of the star, heating its coronal zone.
• With the help of photography, the telescope captured the mass birth of nanoflares in the corona of a celestial body, which then transforms into a giant burst under the influence of magnetic lines of force- this is one of the most interesting facts about the Sun, obtained by IRIS according to physicists. Mini-flares produce intensely charged particles and are a smaller copy of an X-class solar flare - its formation begins with the appearance of a magnetized bunch on the "body" of a star, which eventually grows into huge loops of prominences.

Scientific information about the Sun: life cycle

The current age of our star is estimated by scientists at a figure approaching 5 billion years - this is approximately the middle of it life cycle. The celestial body belongs to the class of G2V stars of the yellow dwarf type, formed as a result of compression of a cloud of molecular hydrogen under the influence of gravity. At the current stage of development, thermonuclear reactions are constantly taking place on the Sun, as a result of which it loses its hydrogen reserves and becomes hotter. In 1 billion years, the star will be 11% brighter than in this moment, will practically die out, remaining only in the oceans and at the poles - and then, in the sense of the word that is not quite familiar to us - this is a scientific fact that the scientific community sadly states.

As the hydrogen escapes, the core shrinks, and the outer shell expands, the intensity of the Sun's glow in 3.5 billion years will increase by 40%, which will lead to the destruction of all life forms on Earth: our planet will become similar to Venus (the temperature on its surfaces - almost plus 500 Celsius). After another 7 billion years, the luminary will turn into a subgiant star, its diameter will increase and will steadily grow due to the enlargement of the outer layers, after which the celestial body will move on to the next phase of its evolution - it will join the ranks of red giants. According to scientists, at that time the boundaries of the sphere of the Sun will reach the Earth and absorb it, and the solar wind will blow the atmosphere of our planet into space.

After another 20 million years, our sun will transform into a nebula, concentrated around a hot and radiant (thousands of times more intense than the current Sun) white dwarf, which will fade for many more billions of years. The usual development of such a scenario “from the life of stars” is an explosion and the birth of a Supernova – but this will not happen with the Sun. Surprising as it may seem to us to realize this fact, its mass is negligible on a universal scale (the diameter of the sphere is “only” 109 Earth diameters).

IRIS Solar Exploration Mission: Interesting Facts

The IRIS observatory has taken an important place in the retinue of NATO missions to study the activity of the Sun - it will help astronomers unravel the mystery of the interaction between the surface of the star and its corona, and obtain new information about stars of similar magnitude in general. The two-year program of IRIS stay in an orbit synchronized with the sun will allow the world community to observe the star almost continuously: the telescope-spectrograph will record how the matter of the star moves, gains energy and heats up in the convective region of the lower layers of its atmosphere. No less interest of the world community is the one that gives scientists original "food" for analysis.

From the former scientific research It is known that the transit (convective) section between the photosphere and the corona of the Sun charges its dynamic atmosphere, heated to millions of degrees, generates the solar wind and most of the ultraviolet radiation. Another widely exaggerated scientific fact: coronal mass ejections - flares on the Sun, significantly affect the near-Earth space and the Earth's climate, form space weather.

Interesting to know! The IRIS telescope-spectrograph - Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) was launched on June 27, 2013 from Vandeberg Air Force Base (California, USA). Main purpose: study of the solar atmosphere in conjunction with the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory - SDO, launched into orbit in February 2010 from Cape Canaveral in the United States.

The region of the Sun's envelope that scientists are interested in lies between the visible, white-hot surface of the photosphere (about 6,000 degrees Celsius) and the much hotter corona, with a temperature of many millions of degrees. The interaction between a rapidly moving plasma and magnetic field The luminaries in this layer, according to scientific information, are a source of energy that heats the star's halo many thousands of times more than its surface.

The spectral telescope, which is part of the IRIS equipment and shoots in the ultraviolet range, will allow NASA to receive high-resolution photo frames of both the surface of the Sun and its spectrum: the space observatory will capture the activity of the star every 5-10 seconds, the spectrum will be divided every 2 seconds. The collected information will serve as a basis for subsequent computer simulation of the convection of heat and energy from the lower layers of the atmosphere of a celestial body to its corona, and will also make it possible to analyze an identical phenomenon in "sun-like" stars - yellow dwarfs.

The spectrograph of the IRIS telescope is able to stratify the glow of a star into waves various lengths, which will enable physicists to obtain new scientific information about its nature, calculate the temperature, determine the density of matter and the speed of its movement. Given that spectral line corresponds not only to a certain color, but also to temperature, the IRIS functionality includes the ability to fix values ​​​​from 4 to 65 thousand degrees Celsius in normal mode and up to 10 million degrees Celsius during solar flares.

Carefully looking at the star, either emerging at dawn or leaving the sky, scientists are trying to understand “what the day is preparing for us” (c) - they are looking for high-tech methods to learn even more new information about the Sun. Perceiving scientific information as simple Interesting Facts few of us think about our celestial body: maybe the astrophysicists are wrong? And the end of the world is closer than it seems? Probably for this reason, there is an intensive search. Just in case we have somewhere to go?

In contact with

The sun - the central body of the solar system - is a hot ball of gas. It is 750 times more massive than all other bodies in the solar system combined. That is why everything is solar system can be roughly considered as revolving around the Sun. The sun outweighs the earth 330,000 times. A chain of 109 planets like ours could be placed on the solar diameter. The sun is the closest star to the Earth, it is the only star whose visible disk is visible to the naked eye. All other stars distant from us by light years, even when viewed through powerful telescopes, do not reveal any details of their surfaces. Light from the Sun reaches us in 8 and a third minutes. According to one of the hypotheses, it was together with the Sun that our planetary system, the Earth, and then life on it, formed.

The sun rushes in the direction of the constellation Hercules in an orbit around the center of our Galaxy, overcoming more than 200 km every second. The Sun and the center of the Galaxy are separated by an abyss of 25,000 light years. The same path runs from the Sun to the outskirts of the Galaxy. Our star is located near the galactic plane, not far from the border of one of the spiral arms. Therefore, walking in the park and leisurely leaving 3 km per hour behind us, we simultaneously rotate along with the surface of our planet around earth's axis at a speed of 23 km per minute at the latitude of Moscow, we revolve with the Earth around the Sun, leaving 30 km behind every second, and, finally, at a speed of 230 km per second, we surf the expanses of our Galaxy. We save the reader from listing the movements of the latter.

The fate of the sun

Like all stars, the Sun was born in a compressed gas and dust nebula. When such a grandiose mass (2.1030 kg) was compressed, it heated itself strongly by internal pressure to temperatures at which thermonuclear reactions could begin in its center. So a newborn star was lit (do not confuse with new stars). In the central part, the temperature on the Sun is 15,000,000 K, and the pressure reaches hundreds of billions of atmospheres.

Basically, for three-quarters, the Sun at the beginning of its life consisted of hydrogen. It is hydrogen that in the course of thermonuclear reactions turns into helium, while the energy emitted by the Sun is released. The sun belongs to a type of star called a yellow dwarf. It is a main sequence star and belongs to the spectral type G2. The mass of a lone star always determines its fate. During its lifetime (5 billion years), in the center of our star, where the temperature is quite high, about half of all the hydrogen available there burned out. The sun has about the same life left, 5 billion years.