SDO | Solar Dynamics Observatory - Facts

The Sun is 93 million miles away from the Earth!

The Sun is almost 5 billion years old!

It takes 200,000 years for light to make it from the core to the surface of the Sun but then only 8 minutes to reach the Earth!

Electric currents high above the surface can cause ground induced currents that disrupt power transmission and degrade pipelines

The ionization of our atmosphere by Space Weather affects radio communications and GPS navigation

Space weather is caused by charged particles and their motions

Radiation from Space Weather creates the ionosphere, affects astronauts, and destroys satellites

All wavelengths of light, from X-rays to radio, vary with the solar cycle. They also vary on shorter and longer timescales.

The primary energy the Earth receives from the Sun is radiant energy, or light.

Solar activity starts in the convection zone of the Sun where the solar dynamo produces the Sun's magnetic field.

The Sun's energy is produced by nuclear reactions in the core.

The primary energy the Earth receives from the Sun is radiant energy, or light.

All wavelengths of light, from X-rays to radio, vary with the solar cycle. They also vary on shorter and longer timescales.

Studying how the Sun's variability affects the Earth requires identifying the sources and timescales of the solar variability and measuring the response.

Solar activity starts in the convection zone of the Sun where the solar dynamo produces the Sun's magnetic field.

Short-term variations are also related to the magnetic field. Flares and coronal mass ejections are examples of rapid solar variations.

The wavelengths that contribute the greatest energy to Earth vary by the smallest fraction, while wavelengths with small net energy input exhibit larger fractional changes.

Space weather is mentioned in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726), where the Laputians worried "That the Face of the Sun will by Degrees be encrusted with its own Effluvia, and give no more light to the World."

Sunspots are mentioned in Paradise Lost, by John Milton, 1674, Book 3, Line 590, which reads: "There lands the Fiend, a spot like which perhaps; Astronomer in the Sun's lucent Orbe; through his glaz'd Optic Tube yet never saw."

The Sun is an average star. There are stars which are much hotter and cooler as well as brighter and dimmer than our Sun.

The Sun's diameter is about 1.4 million km (900,000 mi) or approximately 110 times wider than the Earth.

It would take about 1 million Earths to fill the Sun if it were a hollow ball.

If you shrunk the Sun to the size of a basketball, the Earth would only be the size of the head of a pin.

Traveling at 60 mi/h (80 km/h), it would take 176 years to get to the Sun.

The Sun is a big ball of plasma mostly made up of hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and neon.

Because the Sun is plasma and not a solid like the Earth, the Sun rotates faster at the equator than id does at the poles.