The sun is a gigantic sphere of hot gas and fire. It illuminates our world and every other one nearby, for that matter. Without it, life would be impossible, as the millions of chemical reactions needed for our planet to sustain us would never be able to continue without the constant presence of our sun. Orbits within the solar system depend on it, and every day you get up in the morning is thanks to that massive star. It should probably come as no surprise that we know far more about the workings of our sun more than we do our own planet.
Put in perspective, the sun is only an average star. It is larger than a white dwarf, yet does not even approach the girth of any red giants. The sun has a modest temperature compared to others-about one million degrees at the core. Even so, our star does what others have never come conceivably close to doing:it helped foster life on what would have been a very stark world. For all the brightness and hotness of a white giant or the excess energy leaks of white dwarfs, none have yet been known to have populated a planet with life.
Our solar battery has four main layers; the helium core, the hydrogen middle layer, the photosphere, and then the corona. In the former two layers, hydrogen is converted to helium by energy-emitting chemical reactions. Billions upon billions of these reactions occur every second, releasing vast amounts of energy collapsed he photosphere. It moves rather slowly through the layers, yet doesn’t lose any of it’s potency. At the surface, it explodes outward, sometimes creating a huge arc of hot gasses and dust. It radiates through space tot he various corners of our solar system, sometimes striking a planet and warming it.
The sun causes our seasons, tides, climatic changes, and even the aurora Borealis and Australis. Solar particles ejected from the sun reach Earth’s atmosphere and are either used in warming the planet, causing oxidation reactions in the upper ionosphere, producing the Aurora, or bouncing off into space. The heat transfer can go into the oceans, landmasses, and even into air masses. As was stated previously, even biological organisms benefit from the sun, as all chemical reactions occur with the added energy and light of the sun. Without the sun, no heat or chemical transfer would take place. There would be no weather, no long range ocean currents, no water cycle or aurora, and definitely no life.
