Sun facts ! It might be just an ordinary star...but it keeps us alive !!
The Sun is 99.9% of all matter in our universe & sheds hot plasma at a million miles an hour !!
We are entering the next Solar maximum and solar storms are on the rise ....watchout satellites /GPS !
It's about 4.6 billion years old and its mass about 330,330 times Earth.
Distance to sun 150,000,000 km = 150 million km =1 Astronomical unit = 1AU
If you could drive to the sun at 80 km/hr -- it would take over 200 years.
Sunlight takes about 8 minutes & 20 seconds to reach the Earth at 300 million km /hr.
Estimates of the Sun's distance from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy range is about 26,500 light years from the centre of the Galaxy.
The Sun is dragging Earth around galaxy at 800,000 km /hr and orbits every 250 million years
So the Sun has completed about 18 orbits during its 4.5 billion year lifetime...
If a circle then speed = distance/time = circumference/time = 2 π R / 250,000,000 years
This works out to 1,575,000,000,000,000,000 km / (250,000,000 years * 365.2421896698 days/year * 24 hr/day) = 719,000 km/hr
This is about 6.7 times faster than our orbital speed and 430 times faster than our rotational speed (at the Equator)
600 km per second works out to 2,160,000 km/hr (1,342,000 mi/hr)!
Yes - over 2 million km/hr! (but this is still only about 0.2% of the speed of light) And you thought you were sitting still?!
Sun keeps getting brighter, estimated 40% brighter than when the earth formed 4.6 billion years ago.