Sun Facts

Our sun has an expected lifetime of about 11 billion years.

Our sun and the surrounding planets orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy once every 250 million years.

Only 55% of all Americans know that the sun is a star.

On its trip around the sun, the earth travels over a million and a half miles per day.

No solar eclipse can last longer than 7 minutes 58 seconds because of the speed at which the sun moves.

Lightning bolts can sometimes be hotter than the sun. (about 50 000º F)

It takes only 8 minutes for sunlight to travel from the sun to the earth, which also means, if you see the sun go out, it actually went out 8 minutes ago.

In Spit Bergen, Norway at one time of the year the sun shines continuously for three and a half months.

In Newport, Rhode Island it is illegal to smoke from a pipe after sunset.

In Devon, Connecticut, it is unlawful to walk backwards after sunset.

If the sun stopped shining suddenly, it would take eight minutes for people on earth to be aware of the fact.

For 186 days you can not see the sun in the North Pole.

Every eleven years the magnetic poles of the sun switch. This cycle is called"Solarmax".

Aztecs believed that the sun died every night and needed human blood to give it strength to rise the next day. So they sacrificed 15,000 men a year to appease their sun god, Huitzilopochtli. Most of the victims were prisoners taken in wars, which were sometimes started solely to round up sacrificial victims.

At the distance at which our sun is located from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, Earth and the rest of our solar system are moving at a speed of about 170 miles per second around the center.

At its center, the sun has a density of over a hundred times that of water, and a temperature of 10-20 million degrees Celsius.

All the coal, oil, gas, and wood on Earth would only keep the Sun burning for a few days.

An area of the Sun's surface the size of a postage stamp shines with the power of 1,500,000 candles.

Your fingernails can turn yellow from wearing nail polish and from the sun.

If the entire solar system were the size of a quarter, the sun would be visible only under a microscope, and the nearest star would be 300 feet away.

The Sun provides our planet with 126,000,000,000,000 horsepower of energy every day.

If the earth were the size of a quarter, the sun would be as large as a 9 foot ball and would be located a football field distance from the earth.

More than 1 million earths would fit inside the sun.

99% of our solar systems mass is concentrated in the sun.

The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth!