Home › The Sciences › The Sun

The Sun

The distance of the sun from the earth is 91,000,000 miles. If there were a railroad from the earth to the sun in a perfectly straight line, and if one travelled at the rate of thirty miles an hour day and night without stopping, the sun would be reached in 346 years. The diameter of the sun is 850,000 miles. It would take more than 1,200,000 of earths like ours rolled into one to make a ball as large as the sun. There is no such thing as quietness to be found on the sun. The wildest and fiercest turmoil of rushing wind and roaring flame exists. The whole enormous surface of the sun is one restless billowy sea of fire and flame. Flames mount upward to the height of sometimes 100,000 miles above the edge of the sun; cyclones of burning gases rush along at the rate of two or three hundred miles in a second. These terms of turbulence cause rents in the outer envelope huge and dark, commonly from 50 to 100,000 miles across. These rents are often what we see as sun spots. One of them seen in 1839 was 186,000 miles across. Though the sun is much bigger than the earth, his density is only onefourth as much. His immense size, however, more than counterbalances in the force of attraction. So great is it in the sun's surface that a man who on earth weighs 12 or 14 stone [168 or 196 lbs.], and walks erect with no difficulty, would on the sun lie helplessly bound to the ground, crushed by his own overpowering weight.