The Solar System #1: The Sun
Ok the Sun is where we should start because, as Amanda and I forgot the other day, it is technically a part of the Solar system.
The Sun’s about 4.6 billion years old which on the Universal time-scale of star-life makes it a sort of middle-aged baby boomer type star. It’s super thicc, accounting for 99.9% of the Solar System’s TOTAL mass. That’s a lot of mass.
In comparison with other objects in our nearest neighbourhood, the Sun could eat about 1 million Earths and still have room for dessert. It’s so massive that it generates a BUNCH of energy. But if you had an endless supply of dynamite, and a death wish, you could match the energy output of the sun. You’d need to blow up 100 billion tonnes of it per second though so good luck with maintaining that.
There are a few things you’d need to consider if you ever want to visit the Sun. First of all, it RAINS there. I mean… not like life-giving, water-based rain. No we’re talking “HOLY CRAP EVERYTHING’S ON FIRE AND THERE’S FLIPPING PLASMA FALLING FROM THE SKY” kind of rain. Not so great. According to New Scientist, these raindrops from the deepest darkest pits of firey death are also COUNTRY SIZED and fall from as far away as 63,000 km above the Sun’s surface from the Corona.
Also the Sun’s made largely of helium so you’d lose all authority and sound HILARIOUS.
We don’t actually know an awful lot about the sun but we might get a better look at it over the next few years. The NASA Parker Probe launched at the end of last year and is set to fly the closest anything’s ever gone before. Also the ESA has a “Solar Orbiter” that’s almost ready to head up to join the Parker Probe. It won’t get quite as close but it’ll be sending back the clearest photos of the poles we’ll have ever seen so that’s cool.
We do know that we, on Earth, literally live in the Sun’s atmosphere - it’s called the heliosphere and it extends far past the outermost planet of the solar system (which I still maintain is PLUTO AND HOW DARE YOU SAY OTHERWISE NEIL DE GRASSE TYSON!) And we know that things like the Aurora Australis/Borealis are caused by Solar activity.
Photo courtesy of the Maitland Mercury in Tasmania
We also know that the Sun doesn’t rotate evenly - like it doesn’t pull all of its mass with it at once. Think of it like the turbulent orb upstairs. This means that parts of the Sun get “wound up” creating these crazy spots of tension. Once that tension gets too much it all “snaps” and lashes out at the universe in the form of solar flares or coronal mass ejections. Yikes.
This process follows a rough cycle which actually means the Sun has its own calendar! The surface activity cycles through about 11 years; at first it’s low, then the magnetic poles flip and everything goes to hell in a hand cart. The last one of these “solar maximums” was between 2012 to 2015… ish… look everything’s very hand-wavy when it comes to predicting solar activity. Don’t look at me like that.
In scary apocalypse-based news though, the last time a solar storm caused serious damage to us was way back in 1859. A massive coronal mass ejection caused a geomagnetic storm to hit Earth knocking out telegraph lines and causing sparks to literally fly all over the place.
No one really knows what would happen if we were struck by another storm like that. One’s thing’s for sure though - in 1859 the Aurora Australis was seen as far north as QUEENSLAND.
And that should just never happen.
Tomorrow: Mercury
Science Space is a not-for-profit organisation at the University of Wollongong. The work presented here was written by me as a part of a larger project spear-headed by my colleague Amanda Kruger.
