This energy, which can take between 10,000 and 170,000 years to escape the core, is the source of the Sun's light and heat. It is thought that almost all stars form by this process.Įvery second, the Sun's core fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, and in the process converts 4 million tons of matter into energy. The central mass became so hot and dense that it eventually initiated nuclear fusion in its core. Most of this matter gathered in the center, whereas the rest flattened into an orbiting disk that became the Solar System. It formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V), informally called a yellow dwarf, though its light is actually white. Roughly three-quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen (~73%) the rest is mostly helium (~25%), with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.

Its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, comprising about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. The Sun's radius is about 695,000 kilometers (432,000 miles), or 109 times that of Earth. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radiation, and is the most important source of energy for life on Earth. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. ≈ 370 km/s (relative to the cosmic microwave background) ≈ 20 km/s (relative to average velocity of other stars in stellar neighborhood) ≈ 251 km/s (orbit around the center of the Milky Way) Sun, Sol ( / ˈ s ɒ l/), Sól, Helios ( / ˈ h iː l i ə s/) True-color image taken in 2019 using a solar filter

The Star and the Stellae by C.A. Nole