Sun
From CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science
| Sun | |
|---|---|
| |
| The sun with enormous, intensely bright, active regions recorded by the SOHO Spacecraft Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope. | |
| Symbol | ☉ |
| Known to the ancients | |
| Orbital characteristics | |
| Celestial class | Star |
| Primary | Galaxy |
| Perigalacticon | 27,600 ly2.61116e+17 km 1.74545e+9 AU 1.6225e+17 mi[1] |
| Apogalacticon | 31,800 ly3.00851e+17 km 2.01107e+9 AU 1.8694e+17 mi[2] |
| Semi-major axis | 29,700 ly2.80984e+17 km 1.87826e+9 AU 1.74595e+17 mi[3] |
| Orbital eccentricity | 0.07[2] |
| Sidereal year | 250,000,000 a9.13125e+10 da |
| Avg. orbital speed | 217 km/s781,200 km/h 134.838 mi/s 485,415.175 mph |
| Inclination | 25°0.436 rad 27.778 grad to the galactic plane |
| Rotational characteristics | |
| Sidereal day | 609.12 h25.38 da[4] |
| Solar day | 27.2753 da654.607 h[5][6] |
| Physical characteristics | |
| Mass | 1.9891 * 1030 kg1 M☉ 1,047.612 M♃[4][5] |
| Mean density | 1408 kg/m³1.408 g/ml 87.899 lb/ft³[4] |
| Mean radius | 696,000 km432,474.35 mi[4] |
| Equatorial radius | 695,500 km432,163.664 mi[5] |
| Surface gravity | 274.0 m/s²898.95 ft/s² 27.94 g[4][5] |
| Escape speed | 617.7 km/s2,223,720 km/h 383.821 mi/s 1,381,755.548 mph[4][5] |
| Surface area | 6,087,799,000,000 km²2.35051e+12 mi² 1 A☉ 97.907 A♃[5] |
| Minimum temperature | 4000 K3,726.85 °C 6,740.33 °F 7,200 °R[4][7] |
| Mean temperature | 5777 K5,503.85 °C 9,938.93 °F 10,398.6 °R[5] |
| Maximum temperature | 8000 K7,726.85 °C 13,940.33 °F 14,400 °R[7] |
| Composition | [[Composition::92.1% hydrogen, 7.8% helium]][5] |
| Color | #FF9933 |
| Magnetosphere | |
| Magnetic dipole moment at present | 3.5 * 1029 N-m/T[8][9] |
| Magnetic dipole moment at creation | 4.65 * 1029 N-m/T[8] |
| Decay time | 19000 a6,939,750 da[8] |
| Half life | 13170 a4,810,342.5 da[3] |
The sun (either from the Greek, helios or from the Latin word sol) is a G2 V star. All planetary objects and other systems within our solar system revolve around it.[7]
Contents |
Nomenclature
The G2 class is the the second level of hottest stars within the yellow G class. A "V" star in this class is a yellow dwarf star--but the Sun is in fact in the 95th percentile in its class by size and mass of other stars in its immediate region.[7]
History
Biblical
The Bible says:God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. Genesis 1:16
This took place during the fourth day of Creation Week. More to the point, the Sun is a part of God's creation, not a "god" in its own right.
Mythological
In contrast, virtually every other civilization has regarded the Sun as one of many gods. The Egyptians called the Sun Ra or Re, a deity whom, they said, created the world.[10] The Egyptians also called the sun-disk Aten, and for a brief period (during the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV or Akhenaten), actually worshipped Aten as the one and only god of the universe.[11] In Babylonia and Assyria the sun was called Shamash, a god who, because he could see everything happening on earth, was also associated with truth and justice.[12] The Greeks at first regarded Helios as a son of heaven and earth but later came to associate the Sun with their god of truth, Apollo.
The most common theme in all the sun-worship cults is the association of the sun with truth and justice personified. The second most common theme is the regarding of the sun as the creator.
Orbital characteristics and galactic relationships
The Sun orbits the galactic center at a distance less than half the total estimated radius of the galaxy, and in an orbit inclined about 25° from the galactic plane. The eccentricity of the Sun's orbit is 0.07, about average in comparison to the eccentricities of the planets and dwarf planets of the solar system. At present the Sun lies 50 light years north of the galactic plane and is continuing to climb north of it as it approaches perigalacticon.[13]
Properties and Characteristics
The sun accounts for 99.8% of our solar system's total mass. With a mass of 2 x 1030 kg, an atmospheric temperature of about 5800 K, and a luminosity of 4x1020 megawatts, the sun is by far the most extraordinary object during the day-time sky and of our solar system. However within our Milky Way galaxy it is one of probably 100 billion of the same types of stars.
The tremendous light and heat that the sun releases, and the delicate position that the Earth occupies in relation to the sun, combine to make the sun an integral part of sustaining life.
Core temperatures reach 15,000,000 K (K = Kelvin) while the sun's surface or photosphere temperature is 5,800 K. When the photosphere is hit by the heat of the sun the temperature drops to a minimum of 4,000 K. It then continues further until it encounters a thin layer of atmosphere roughly 10,000 kilometers deep called the chromosphere and reverses trend to rise to 8,000 K. Even further is another part of the sun's total atmosphere called the corona that blends in with interplanetary space.
Energy production and transport
The sun produces its energy through nuclear fusion.[14] The sun uses a type of nuclear fusion called the proton-proton chain reaction. This is when a nucleus with one proton (hydrogen) is fused with another proton, creating a two particle nucleus. Then it fuses to become a three particle, then finally a four particle. The final four particle nucleus contains two neutrons and two protons, which is the element called helium. There are also energy and many other products that are released. The favored model for energy production relies on tremendous pressures resulting from the sun's own mass to overcome the natural electrostatic repulsive forces that normally keep hydrogen atoms from coming together and fusing.[7]
The model for hydrogen fusion includes these three equations:
Here, e represents an electron, H means hydrogen, He means helium, γ represents a gamma photon, ν represents a small, uncharged particle called a neutrino that is not supposed to have any proper mass, and the energy unit eV, or electron volt, is the product of the charge on a single electron and the standard unit of electromotive force or electromotive potential.
The energy produced varies as the fourth power of the temperature--and at the temperatures thought to prevail in the sun's core, matter exists, not as ordinary matter with atomic nuclei and electrons, but as plasma--a form of super-hot matter in which atoms are totally denuded of their electrons.
The first equation above is assumed to be the rate-limiting step. The neutrinos produced should have an energy of 0.26 MeV--too little energy to be detectable by current technology. But processes occurring after this step ought to produce higher-energy neutrinos that would be detectable. Such neutrinos have been detected, but at a flux much smaller than predicted. This indicates that the presumed rates for these subsequent processes are higher than the true rates, or else the neutrinos produced somehow transform to a different type of neutrino that would be unobservable. That in turn would imply that neutrinos do have rest mass.[7]
According to current models, some of this energy is transferred to the surface by convection in the outer 20-30% of the body of the sun.[14] Helium in this convective zone rises to or near the surface, releases its heat, and then sinks back to the center. Helium absorbs radiation more readily than does hydrogen, and for that reason the sun is always getting marginally brighter with the passage of time.[7]
The remaining energy is transferred in the gamma photons, which must take a "random walk" to reach the corona of the Sun. Current models suggest that the light generated by these processes takes 50 million years to reach the surface.[14]
Sunspots
The earliest observations of sunspots might have been made in the fourth century BC by the Greeks. Chinese astronomical records dating back to 28 BC include descriptions of changing dark patches on the sun that might have been sunspots.[15]
Galileo Galilei in 1613 was the first astronomer to study sunspots in any detail. It was a revolutionary observation, and one that clashed greatly with Western man's ideas of the heavens, propounded chiefly by Aristotle, as a perfect, unblemished place.[15][16]
An amateur astronomer, Heinrich Schwabe, was the first to note the sunspot cycle in 1843.[17] The sunspots are dark on account of their cooler temperature. This in turn is due to strong magenetic fields which allow the transport of heat via convective motion in the sun. At times these sunspots can be 50,000 miles in diameter and appear in two bands, one being north and the other south in the direction of the sun's equator.
Observations have also shown that the number and location of sunspots come and go in a semi-periodic 9.5 to 11-year solar cycles. At the start of this cycle they are about 30 degrees from the equator. Midway through, the cycle of the number of sunspots observed is maximum, usually about 15 degrees from the equator. Near the end of this on average 10.8-year cycle, the sunspots are very near the equator.[18][19]
The solar magnetosphere
The magnetosphere oscillates in synchrony with the sunspots in a twenty-two-year cycle. The current amplitude of that cycle is 3.5 * 1029 N-m-T. This amplitude has been decaying since creation, but relatively slowly, with a half-life of 13,170 Julian years. In fact, according to Humphreys[8], the sun's magnetic field has lost perhaps 25 percent of its strength since creation.
Measurements of the sun's magnetic dipole moment have not been exact enough to demonstrate whether the amplitude of the field's oscillations is constant or decaying. If those oscillations are in fact decaying, then the Sun cannot be a dynamo.[8]
Problems for uniformitarian theories posed by the Sun
Uniformitarians commonly estimate that the Sun is about 4.5 billion years old, has consumed about half its nuclear fuel (hydrogen), and will begin to die within about 5 billion years.[20]
But they also must admit that the sun continues to brighten as it continues to fuse hydrogen into helium. In fact, by uniformitarian estimates, the sun ought to be 40% brighter today than it was when the planets formed and 33% brighter than it was when life first formed (3.8 billion years ago by evolutionary assumptions). The Earth thus ought to be much hotter today than it once was--or rather, the Earth was much colder in the early days in which life has existed than it is today. The fossil record demonstrably does not bear this out.[7][21] Uniformitarians answer that the Earth's atmosphere might be compensating for this increased brightness. (But these are often the same scientists who insist that industrial and transport-related introduction of carbon dioxide into Earth's atmosphere threatens to overheat the Earth, with potentially disastrous results.)
Uniformitarians have also had to admit that the sun rotates about 200 times more slowly than the nebula hypothesis would predict, simply on account of the contraction of the solar mass into its present volume. This violates of the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum. This "angular momentum" problem has been apparent for hundreds of years and remains unresolved to this day.[21]
The sun's equatorial plane is inclined 7.25° to the ecliptic. (See Earth.) By the nebula hypothesis, that inclination should be zero. The errant inclination poses an especially acute problem for the orbit of Neptune. Uniformitarians have speculated that a collision with an even larger object knocked the sun off a true perpendicular to its present inclination--but no scientist has offered a convincing speculation as to what that object might be.[21]
Conventional astronomers, Carl Sagan among them, insist that our star is mediocre and unremarkable. Yet the G-type of star is relatively rare, and furthermore its mass and position in the galaxy lie within very narrow tolerances for the support of life. The sun is also a singular star, not part of a binary--also a rare finding--and is remarkably stable in its energy output. These facts combine to make the sun an unusually hospitable star for a planet to have life on it.[21]
Finally, the only reason that uniformitarians can cite for a great age of the Sun is the apparent great age of the Earth.[7]. At least one astronomer has frankly admitted that the Sun itself gives no clue to any such tremendous age, and that the acceptance of a very young age of the Sun, like the six-thousand-plus years calculated by James Ussher, might logically follow from a modicum of new evidence:[21][22]
| “ | There is no evidence based solely on solar observations, Eddy stated, that the sun is 4.5-5 x 109 years old. "I suspect," he said, "that the Sun is 4.5-5 billion years old. However, given some new and unexpected results to the contrary, and some time for frantic recalculation and theoretical readjustment, I suspect that we could live with Bishop Ussher's value for the age of the earth and sun. I don't think we have much in the way of observational evidence in astronomy to conflict with that." | ” |
Gallery
 A coronal mass ejection (CME) |
 The magnetosphere deflects the flow of most solar wind particles around the Earth. |
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Satellites
The satellites of the Sun include all the planets and dwarf planets, and most of the asteroids.
Table of satellites, in order from the innermost to the outermost:| Name | Perihelion | Aphelion | Eccentricity | Sidereal year | Inclination | Mass | Sidereal day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury (planet) | 460000000000.307 AU46,000,000 km 28,583,074.843 mi |
698200000000.467 AU69,820,000 km 43,384,136.642 mi |
0.20560.206 | 87.9690.241 a87.969 da | 0.12217304763967 °0.122 rad 7.778 grad |
3.302E+230.0553 M⊕3.302e+23 kg 1.73908e-4 M♃ |
50673601,407.6 h58.65 da |
| Venus | 1074800000000.718 AU107,480,000 km 66,784,975.742 mi |
1089400000000.728 AU108,940,000 km 67,692,177.682 mi |
0.00670.0067 | 224.7010.615 a224.701 da | 0.0591666616426083.39 °0.0592 rad 3.767 grad |
4.8685E+240.815 M⊕4.8685e+24 kg 0.00256 M♃ |
-20997000-5,832.5 h-243.021 da |
| Mars | 2066200000001.381 AU206,620,000 km 128,387,715.74 mi |
2492300000001.666 AU249,230,000 km 154,864,342.241 mi |
0.09350.0935 | 686.981.881 a686.98 da | 0.0322885911618951.85 °0.0323 rad 2.056 grad |
6.4185E+230.107 M⊕6.4185e+23 kg 3.38047e-4 M♃ |
88642.4424.623 h1.026 da |
| Jupiter | 7405200000004.95 AU740,520,000 km 460,137,795.276 mi |
8166200000005.459 AU816,620,000 km 507,424,143.005 mi |
0.048390.0484 | 4330.58662511.857 a4,330.587 da | 0.0227765467385261.305 °0.0228 rad 1.45 grad |
1.8987E+27317.721 M⊕1.8987e+27 kg 1 M♃ |
357309.925 h0.414 da |
| Saturn | 13525500000009.041 AU1.35255e+9 km 840,435,606.061 mi |
151450000000010.124 AU1.5145e+9 km 941,066,670.643 mi |
0.05650.0565 | 10759.2229.457 a10,759.22 da | 0.0433714319120592.485 °0.0434 rad 2.761 grad |
5.6846E+2695.124 M⊕5.6846e+26 kg 0.299 M♃ |
38361.610.656 h0.444 da |
| Uranus | 274130000000018.324 AU2.7413e+9 km 1.70336e+9 mi |
300362000000020.078 AU3.00362e+9 km 1.86636e+9 mi |
0.04570.0457 | 30681.6153001584.002 a30,681.615 da | 0.0129852496348380.744 °0.013 rad 0.827 grad |
8.6832E+2514.53 M⊕8.6832e+25 kg 0.0457 M♃ |
-62064-17.24 h-0.718 da |
| Neptune | 444445000000029.709 AU4.44445e+9 km 2.76165e+9 mi |
454567000000030.386 AU4.54567e+9 km 2.82455e+9 mi |
0.01130.0113 | 60189.5475164.79 a60,189.548 da | 0.030874874467781.769 °0.0309 rad 1.966 grad |
1.0243E+2617.14 M⊕1.0243e+26 kg 0.0539 M♃ |
5799616.11 h0.671 da |
| Pluto | 4436824591966.429.658 AU4.43682e+9 km 2.75691e+9 mi |
737592789763249.305 AU7.37593e+9 km 4.58319e+9 mi |
0.248807660.249 | 90614.8725248.09 a90,614.872 da | 0.2991799770537417.142 °0.299 rad 19.046 grad |
-551856.672-153.294 h-6.387 da | |
| Eris | 567424720910037.93 AU5.67425e+9 km 3.52581e+9 mi |
1459028026110097.53 AU1.45903e+10 km 9.06598e+9 mi |
0.440.44 | 203590.35557.4 a203,590.35 da | 0.7707286710344444.16 °0.771 rad 49.066 grad |
288008 h0.333 da | |
| Nemesis | 1.316461256E+158,800 AU1.31646e+12 km 8.18011e+11 mi |
2.5012763864E+16167,200 AU2.50128e+13 km 1.55422e+13 mi |
0.90.9 | 949650000026,000,000 a9.4965e+9 da |
References
Related Links
- Sun by Wikipedia
- Yaron, Ofer. "The Galactic Environment of the Sun." Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, n.d. Accessed January 17, 2008.
- Sunspots The Exploratorium, 1998.
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See also
| The Solar System | ||
| Star | Sol | |
| Factitious Planet | Vulcan | |
| Terrestrial Planets | Mercury • Venus • Earth • Mars | |
| Gas giants | Jupiter • Saturn • Uranus • Neptune | |
| Dwarf Planets | Ceres • Pluto • Eris | |
| Asteroid Belt | Major asteroids • C-type asteroids • S-type asteroids • M-type asteroids | |
| Trans-Neptunian Objects | Kuiper belt • Scattered disk • Oort cloud • Nemesis | |
| Moons | Terrestrial • Martian • Jovian • Saturnine • Uranian • Neptunian • Plutonian • Eridian | |
| Featured moons | Moon • Phobos • Deimos • Io • Europa • Ganymede • Callisto • Mimas • Enceladus • Tethys • Dione • Rhea • Titan • Hyperion • Iapetus • Miranda • Ariel • Umbriel • Titania • Oberon • Triton • Nereid • Charon • Nix • Hydra • Dysnomia |
