Abstract
To understand what makes the Sun shine, we must first describe the star’s physical characteristics. The entire Sun is nothing but a big luminous ball of gas, hot and concentrated at the center and cooler and more tenuous further out. It is the most massive and largest object in our solar system. The Sun’s mass, which is 333,000 times Earth’s mass, can be inferred from Kepler’s third law and the Earth’s orbital period and mean distance from the Sun. And the Sun’s size, at 109 times the diameter of the Earth, can be inferred from the Sun’s distance and angular extent.
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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Lang, K.R. (2009). Exploring Unseen Depths of the Sun. In: The Sun from Space. Astronomy and Astrophysics Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76953-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76953-8_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76952-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-76953-8
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