Space Part 1: Our Solar System: The Sun

7,926 miles. Can you guess what this number is without reading further?  I'll give you a second......

Well, if you paid attention to the title of this blog, you would figure it has something to do with our solar system.  7,926 miles is the diameter of the Earth.  Meaning, the distance from one point on the equator straight through the Earth to the other; or, the literal "space" our tiny planet takes up in our solar system.  In this blog I hope to put our place in the solar system in perspective.  Often times I find it difficult to imagine the great distances of space, or even the amazing facts about space that I come across.  To begin, as any discussion of the Solar System should, I start with the Sun.

The Sun:
Our sun is the largest single object in our solar system.  With a diameter of 865,000 miles, you could line up close to 110 Earths end to end in this space.

  However when one considers the distances of the planets in our solar system from the sun, the scale of its size and power becomes very real.  There are 93 million miles between the Earth and the Sun, which could also be described as 11,733 Earths.  We here on the Earth, enjoy very happy and enjoyable temperatures, compared to the surface of the Sun, which hovers at about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  Meaning that, in the 93 million miles between the Earth and the Sun, we are still able to feel the "heat" of our star.  The Sun helps to power our planet and is the provider of food and energy to nearly every living thing on our planet.  We are very lucky to have a star like our sun. In comparison to other stars in the universe, our sun is tiny.  The biggest star discovered by scientists thus far is the red hypergiant star, VYCanis Majoris.  This star has a diameter of about 1.9 billion miles.  Seriously the mother fucker is huge.  If you were to plop it in the center of our Solar System, it would extend to just past Uranus.

Here is a nice size comparison!

But this is a topic for another day.  The point of this is that our sun is small.  But this size works in our favor because smaller stars like our sun live a lot longer than these larger stars, which only live in the 100's of millions of years range.  Whereas our sun, which is about 4.6 billion years old, should live for about 5 to 6 billion more years.  However, for those of you who were thinking of sticking around for the long haul.  In the next billion years or so, the Sun's temperature will have increased so much that liquid water will no longer be sustained on this planet.  Sad, but true.  Luckily, we will have killed ourselves long before that point, so, no worries!  The size of our sun tells us something else about its future.  Our sun will never supernova!  Why do you ask? Well, our sun simply does not have the mass to supernova.  It will however, about 10 billion years into its lifecycle, become what is known as a Red Giant star.  This will happen because as the Sun uses up its fuel, the temperatures and pressures of the gases the sun creates will cause it to swell up, extending to about where the Earth is now.  After about 1-2 billion years in this phase, the sun will begin ejecting some of its mass and will become a planetary nebula (a huge collection of gas and dust in space) with a small, White Dwarf Star (our sun) at it's center.  This White Dwarf phase of its life will continue on and on and on, longer than the life of our galaxy and longer than many other stars in our universe.  This is because a White Dwarf star simply keeps on cooling off pretty much forever and ever. There are many factors that contribute to this, but the coolest one is that White Dwarfs are just extremely dense and thus give off their heat very slowly.  The white dwarf, even though it spewed off a bunch of mass during the red giant phase, has a mass nearly equal to our current sun, in a volume about as big as the Earth.  White Dwarf stars are some of the most intriguing stars out there.

A white dwarf compared to the sun and the Earth

The phase after this part of our Sun's life is only hypothetical and is currently being referred to as the Black Dwarf phase.  This, again hypothetically, is the phase where our sun will no longer give off significant light or heat.  Why is this hypothetical?  Well, to put it simply, our universe has not been around for a long enough time for a white Dwarf star, that we have discovered, to reach the "Black Dwarf" phase.  While our planet certainly will not be around forever, our Sun, with its power and awesome size, will be around for billions of years to come.

This is the first entry on our Solar System.  I will be doing one every day for the next few weeks.  Please enjoy!