26 Sun Facts For Kids

1. The Sun is the common name for the star in our Solar System.
2. Our Sun is a heavy-element-rich, Population I, G-Type main-sequence star (G2V type) that is heavy-element-rich.
3. The Sun is inaccurately called a yellow dwarf star when the Sun’s light is white.
4. The Sun is shaped as a near-perfect sphere, with an estimated oblateness at 9 millionths.
5. The Sun is found at the center of our Solar System, which is in the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
6. The Sun and our Solar System is about 26,660 light-years from the Galactic Center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
7. The Sun formed around 4.6 billion years ago or based on available radiometric dating 4.567 billion years ago.
8. The Sun creates light and heat through a process known as nuclear fusion and it’s estimated that every second the Sun fuses 4 million tons of matter into energy, or about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium.
9. The Sun is made up of ~73% hydrogen, ~15% helium with the rest being heavy elements like carbon, iron, neon, and oxygen.
10. The is made up of several regions: the core, the radiative zone, the convection zone, the surface (photosphere), the chromosphere, the transition zone, and the corona.
11. Energy produced in the Sun’s core takes about 170,000 years to reach the photosphere (surface).
12. The core of the Sun can reach a temperature up to 27 million °F.
13. The surface of the Sun has a temperature of about 10,000 °F.
14. The corona of the Sun (outer atmosphere) can reach a temperature up to 3.5 million °F.
15. The radius of the Sun is about 432,000 miles or about 109 times large than the planet Earth.
16. The Sun is large enough that it would take 1.3 million Earth’s to completely fill the Sun.
17. The Sun has about 330,000 more mass than the planet Earth and accounts for 99.86% of all mass in our Solar System.
18. The Sun has an estimated lifespan of about 10 billion years and currently it has about another 5 billion years left.
19. After five billion years, the Sun will become a Red Giant, and will grow large enough to reach the orbit of Venus.
20. After one to two billion years as a Red Giant, our Sun will become a white dwarf and stay like that for trillions of years.
21. A sunspot occurs on the Sun’s surface when there is a reduced temperature in an area and a black spot appears.
22. A solar flare is an eruption of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun’s atmosphere.
23. A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a massive plasma release from the Sun’s corona to the heliosphere.
24. If the Earth is in the path of a CME, it can cause damage to man-made electronics. The worst CME event in recorded history was the Carrington Event in September of 1859. If that event happened today, it would cause around $2.9 trillion in damages (2020 USD) worldwide.
25. A unit of length used by astronomers is called the astronomical unit, with the value of 1 being equal to the distance of the Sun’s center to the Earth’s center.
26. Ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun can be dangerous to humans who experience long-term exposure. The most common effect of long-term exposure to the Sun is sunburned skin. However, skin cancer is a more serious and common result of long-term exposure to the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation.

Sun Pictures

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the below images will be helpful for your research on the planet Venus. Below are six various pictures and diagrams of the Sun. These pictures should help you better understand Sun, the star holding our Solar System together.

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