Planetário do Porto - The Sun, Our Star

The Sun has illuminated the Earth for the last four billion six hundred million years, and its heat, which warms our skin today, has likewise been felt by all the human beings who have ever lived. It is the star closest to us, the source of energy that generates the winds, the weather conditions, and sustains life as we know it. For millennia, many civilizations used the apparent movement of the Sun and its path across the sky to measure the passage of time and create calendars. Compared with the other stars, the Sun is considered a typical dwarf star, but it is far from small. In fact, it has a mass 500 times greater than all the planets in the Solar System combined, and to produce its energy, every second it consumes 600 million tons of hydrogen.