Sun

Sun

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields. It has a diameter of about 1,392,684 km, about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass (about 2×1030 kilograms, 330,000 times that of Earth) accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. Chemically, about three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. The remainder (1.69%, which nonetheless equals 5,628 times the mass of Earth) consists of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon and iron, among others.

Read more about Sun.

Famous quotes containing the word sun:

    The sun is shining.
    The shadows of the lovers have disappeared.
    They are all eyes; they have some demand on me—
    They want me to be more serious than I want to be.
    Louis Simpson (b. 1923)

    Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Heaven has its business and earth has its business: those are two separate things. Heaven, that’s the angels’ pasture; they are happy; they don’t have to fret about food and drink. And you can be sure that they have black angels to do the heavy work like laundering the clouds or sweeping the rain and cleaning the sun after a storm, while the white angels sing like nightingales all day long or blow in those little trumpets like they show in the pictures we see in church.
    Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)