Content tagged "Sun".
4 items (4 articles, 0 stories)
The solar system is racing through the Milky Way at 720,000 km/h, and a single orbit takes 230 million years. Since the dinosaurs died out, the Sun still hasn't completed even a third of a lap.
The Sun's surface runs about 5,500°C. Yet the thin outer atmosphere surrounding it, the corona, sits at roughly 2,000,000°C, about 360 times hotter. That backwards physics has stumped scientists for nearly a century, and Parker Solar Probe is now flying straight into the corona to find the culprit.
Dark "holes" that appear on the Sun's surface from time to time — coronal holes — blast high-speed solar wind toward Earth, disrupting GPS, power grids, and satellite orbits. Here's how space weather works and why it matters.
The Sun rises every morning without fail, but it's just another star — and like every star, it has a lifespan. In about 5 billion years, it will swell into a red giant and almost certainly consume Earth. Here's the full story of the Sun's life.