From our childhood, stars have always been an object of attraction to most of us. The mesmerizing view that the night sky full of stars provide is always enough to amaze us. These celestial bodies, which exist so far away from us, appear as fixed points of light to us. However, in reality they are enormous celestial bodies. Astronomers have identified stars with years of research. They have named some of them and categorized many of them into constellations and asterisms.
Do you know, what is the nearest earth to our mother earth? Are you aware of the star to whom our existence depends a lot? It is the Sun. Yes, the celestial body with immense amount of energy, that we used to identify as a big ball of fire when we were naive, is the nearest star to our earth. The celestial body, which we know to be the cause of day and night, is actually the nearest star to our earth.
Just in case, if you were not aware about the fact that the sun is a star and wondering how the sun is a star, the reason is as follows. Stars are celestial objects, which are capable of producing their own energy through fusion reaction of gases. They are luminous energy producing celestial objects. Since the Sun produces its own energy by the reaction of Helium turning into Hydrogen, it is a star.
This big ball of energy that makes surviving on earth possible has as interesting story of its formation. Research and scientific facts states that the sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago inside an enormous spinning cloud of gas and dust. Science calls this cloud as the solar nebula. The nebula collapsed under its own overwhelming gravity. As its result, it spun faster and eventually flattened into a disk. This event pushed most of the constituents of the nebula towards the center to form our Sun. You might be surprised to know that the Sun makes up about 99.8 percent of the Solar Systems’ mass. The earth, which alone exists with a mass of 5.97219 x 1024 kilograms, thus directs us to the idea about how heavy and huge the Sun probably is. The Sun possesses a diameter of about 865,000 miles that is 1.4 million kilometers.
Every other constituent of the nebula that did not contribute to the formation of the Sun resulted in the formation of the various planets and other celestial objects that orbits the Sun in the Solar System. The young Sun’s early solar wind blew away all the remaining gas and dust after that.
As interesting is the Sun formation, it also holds the possible of a period when it will eventually run out of its energy. Scientists are of the view that, when the Sun dies out, it will expand into an enormous red star. It will expand to the point where it will engulf Mercury and Venus, possibly the Earth too. With regard to this, scientists states that the Sun has lived through a little less than half of its life. They estimate that our nearest star will survive another 5 billion years or so before it turns into a white dwarf.
