Legacy Astronomical Images > Solar System Series > Sun Unit

Description

The Sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy, located at the center of our Solar System. The Sun weighs about 2x1030 kilograms, and is about 1.4x109 meters in diameter. It is composed of about 75% Hydrogen and 25% Helium by mass. Through a series of nuclear reactions in the Sun's core, Hydrogen atoms are fused to to Helium molecules. The energy released by these reactions produces an outward force which balances the inward force of the Sun's own gravity. The temperature in the core is 1.5x107 Kelvin, while the temperature on its surface is 5800 Kelvin.

Collection Items

Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun
Description: A coronal mass ejection (CME) is the mass ejected from the Sun due to a solar flare. CMEs are recognized as primary drivers of disturbances in the interplanetary medium. As such, they can have a profound impact on the near-Earth environment. A…

The Sun
Description: This image of the brightness distribution of the Sun shows that the bright features, the solar active regions, form two bands symmetric about the solar equator. Each active region corresponds to a volume in the corona, in the vicinity of but above…

Solar Flares
Description: These four images are combined radio-optical images of a large solar flare that occurred on 17 June 1989. The red-orange background images are optical images (H-Alpha) and the superimposed contours show radio emission as seen with the VLA at a…

The Radio Sun
Description: When most people think about the Sun, they usually don't have any idea that it is a strong source of radio waves. The picture shows an image of the full disk of the Sun at a frequency of 4.6 GHz made with the Very Large Array radiotelescope in New…

The Quiet Sun
Description: The bottom panel is an image of the quiet chromosphere of the Sun taken with the Yohkoh soft x-ray telescope. The concentric circles superimposed on the image indicate the location and field of view of two VLA images made on September 23, 1992. The…

Collection Tree