The Sun has a pretty big role in our lives, whether we acknowledge
it or not. Our whole concept of time relates to the movement of the
sun through the sky, and our weather, food, energy, abillity to see,
warmth and much more depend on it.
The Sun has a pretty big role in our lives, whether we acknowledge
it or not. Our whole concept of time relates to the movement of the
sun through the sky, and our weather, food, energy, abillity to see,
warmth and much more depend on it.
Fortuantely its not going anywhere in a hurry. Well actually it is; but there's a whole lot more where that came from. According to a few astromony-type people I tracked down on the web, the supply of energy in the sun's core should last for another 5 x 10^9 years or so. Once all the hydrogen in the core is converted to helium, the core will collapse under gravity and heat up, turning into a red giant for the next few hundred million years. Finally it will turn into a white dwarf.
Apparently the sun produces 4 x 10^33 ergs of energy each second. By doing the Einstein thing, it seems the sun is using up about 5 trillion grams each second. The good news is that the core of the sun contains about 240 million trillion trillion grams of hydrogen which still gives us a couple of billion years, so my advice is don't throw out the sun cream just yet.
If you have fascinating questions like this which plague you, check out Scientific American's Ask The Experts page. For astronomical stuff, see Dr Odenwald's Ask The Astronomer page.
I was going to put one of NASA's current images of the sun here, but when I checked them out they all looked pretty much like the first ever tracing images I created, and I wasn't going to bother. But then I thought it was worth it, just to compare.. The image on the left is NASA's "Full Disk H-alpha image of the sun received 97/08/12 at 18:38 UT from Holloman AFB, New Mexico". The others are mine :-)
