Instruction
The sun, seen from space, looks a little different than from the surface of the Earth, and astronauts on orbiting space stations describe it as a dazzling white ball pressed into the black mass of space. However, its light does not interfere with seeing other objects at the same time: stars, the Moon, the Earth. To observe the sun, you need to use dark filters, as the radiation can scorch the corneas of the eyes. Observing in this way, the disk of the star is clearly visible, and around it the very radiation called the corona is visible. It has 2 million kelvins. Thanks to this radiation, life arose and is maintained on our planet.
Upon closer examination of the surface, emissions of a huge amount of energy and matter in the form of prominences are immediately noticeable. From the impact of powerful magnetic fields, they bend into arcs the size of tens of diameters of our planet. During the years of activity, the release of matter into space is especially intense. On Earth, they cause auroras and adversely affect electronic equipment.
Along with prominences, sunspots are also visible, these are areas with a lower temperature relative to the temperature of the rest of the surface. That's why they look darker. But they are very hot and have a temperature of about 5 thousand kelvins. The sunspots are caused by the strength of the star's magnetic field with an 11-year occurrence cycle. The more sunspots, the more solar activity. The spots also show its rotation around its axis with a period of 27 Earth days.
In fact, the Sun does not have a clear surface. The visible flat surface is the photosphere. This is a layer 400 km thick, which gradually turns into a boiling convective zone. The difference in the thickness of the photosphere layer and the distance to the Earth is significant, so it is simply not visible and a feeling of a flat surface is created.
Let's start with Mercury. Mercury is an extremely hot world, because it is very close to the Sun, and it does not have an atmosphere that shields it from the heat of the sun. The absence of an atmosphere is what determines what the sky of Mercury looks like. The stars on Mercury are visible only at night, during the day they are not visible due to the fact that the Sun shines very brightly and outshines the stars with its brilliance. The solar disk is about three times larger than on Earth. The temperature at night is −180, during the day +430.
There is a very interesting feature of the Mercury sky. Once a Mercury year for about 8 days the sun is in the sky Mercury first stops, and then starts moving in the other direction. After eight days, the sun stops again, and then resumes its usual movement.
The second planet from the Sun Venus. You won't see the sun from the surface because of the dense clouds of sulfuric acid, the pressure will squeeze your eyes out, and the temperature is even higher than on Mercury (+480°C), so you hardly have time to see anything.
Red Planet - Mars. The sun on Mars is 1.5 times smaller. The sunset is not red like on Earth, but bluish. The reason for this color of the sky is the same that on Earth gives a blue sky and a red sunset - Rayleigh scattering. The difference between the color of the sky at noon and at sunset is in the volume of the atmosphere that the sun's rays overcome. On Mars, the atmosphere is a hundred times thinner than on Earth, but when the Sun is near the horizon, its light penetrates thirty times the thicker layer of the atmosphere than at noon.
Jupiter- the largest planet in all senses of our system. A giant gas ball, inside which hydrogen acquires metallic properties. The sun is 5.2 times smaller. As it descends into the atmosphere, the Sun will be obscured by clouds of different colors: mostly blues, browns, and reds. However, Jupiter gives off more heat than it receives from outside.
Jupiter has several rings of dust and tiny asteroids. These rings can be seen from latitudes far from the equator. In addition, several moons can be seen in the sky of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. The most noticeable of them will be Io: from Jupiter, it will seem a little larger than our Earth's moon.
Lord of the Rings - Saturn. The most beautiful planet in the solar system. The size of the solar disk is on average 9.5 times (!) smaller than ours. Also, the gas giant emits more heat than it receives from the Sun.
Uranus- a truly unique planet. Uranus is unique in its position, with its axis tilted at 98 degrees, which causes the original planet to orbit while lying on its side. In this position, the main flow of solar energy is directed to the regions of the poles, but, contrary to logical conclusions, the temperature in the equatorial region has higher values. The direction of rotation of the ice giant is the opposite, in relation to the movement in orbit. Uranus makes one revolution in 84 Earth years, and a day passes in 17 hours, this period is calculated approximately due to the uneven movement of the gaseous surface. In short, to imagine how the Sun moves across the sky there requires the boiling of the brain.
Neptune- blue giant. Winds blowing on Neptune have a unique speed, its average number is 1000 km / h, and gusts during a hurricane reach 2400 km / h. Air masses move against the axis of rotation of the planet. An inexplicable fact is the intensification of storms and winds, which is observed with an increase in the distance between the planet and the Sun. The sun is 30 times smaller than the earth.
Thirteen moons of Neptune are known. The largest of them - Triton - will appear slightly larger than our Moon; the next largest Proteus will be half the size. The remaining moons of Neptune are small and will be visible as ordinary stars.
Pluto 40 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, so little solar energy and light comes here that our luminary can be confused with a large star. Pluto and its satellite Charon revolve around each other, and Pluto's orbit is sharply inclined relative to the rest of the planets. A year on Pluto is 248 Earth years. A day for almost a week. The surface temperature ranges from minus 228 to minus 238 °C.
*Illustrated by Ron Miller
The closest star to our planet is the Sun. It is located at a distance of 149 million kilometers and has a diameter of more than 1.4 million km. Scientists have calculated the approximate age of the star - about five billion years. We are used to seeing this yellow dwarf as a bright ball, but what does the Sun actually look like?
View from space
From space, our luminary looks different than from Earth. The astronauts claim that the star is actually not yellow, but white. This dazzling luminous ball seems to be pressed into black space. Its light is bright, but it allows you to see other space objects, including the Moon and some planets. So what does the Sun look like and can it be seen in space? In fact, it is impossible to look at this dwarf without a special light filter, since its light can cause severe burns to the cornea.
If you look at the Sun through this optical device, you will see the stellar disk and the radiation around it, which is called the corona. The star itself has a temperature of over two million Kelvin. Despite such high temperatures, its light helped shape the unique climate on our planet.
solar energy
And what does the Sun look like when viewed closely (by cosmic standards)? In this case, it allows us to consider the emissions of its energy. Powerful magnetic fields lead to stunningly beautiful arcs hundreds of kilometers long. During periods of strong activity, the Sun emits a huge amount of energy. On Earth, we can observe it in the form of the Aurora Borealis or receive distortion of radio signals.
In addition to energy arcs, spots are visible on the luminary. They differ from the rest of the star's surface by a lower temperature. Because of this feature, the spots look darker: the temperature in these zones is about five thousand Kelvin. And the more spots, the stronger the activity of the Sun.
What does the sun really look like? This star does not have a clear boundary, although we see it as a ball. The visible surface is represented by a photosphere four hundred kilometers thick. Gradually, this layer passes into the convective zone. But since the distance to the Earth is too great, we do not see this stratification, but only the celestial body familiar to our eyes.
The sun is our enemy
The dwarf emits a large amount of radiation. On Earth, the atmosphere protects against it: the ozone layer does not let gamma rays through, which have a detrimental effect on all living things.
In space, radiation penetrates everywhere, but astronauts are always protected from it, even when they are outside the station. They are saved by a specially equipped suit: it has special devices that protect against radiation exposure.
Sun from other planets
Many are interested in what the luminary looks like from the planets of our solar system. The largest it is seen from Mercury. From this planet, it appears to be almost three times as large as we see it. An interesting fact: due to the absence of an atmosphere on Mercury, the yellow dwarf is seen in its true light - white. We see the Sun yellow only because of the refraction of its rays in the atmosphere, but it is worth going beyond its limits, and the ball appears in a real form.
The sun is not visible from Venus. Although many would like to know what the Sun looks like in a photo from Venus. But this planet is thickly covered with thick ones and light just can't get through them. If it were possible to see a star from Venus, then it would seem to be just hovering in the sky at one point. This is due to the very slow rotation of the planet around its axis.
From Mars, the Sun looks half the size of what we see it. Here the shade of the luminary is different: white with a slight purple sheen. Due to the high dust content, sunsets and sunrises have a blue tint, and not the yellow-red that we are used to.
Naturally, the farther the planet is from the luminary, the smaller the luminary seems to be on it. From some planets, the Sun looks like a very bright star in the night sky. But even this view does not mean that it is always night on distant planets. On Pluto, for example, there is four hundred times more light than we have from the Moon on a full moon. Of course, sunbathing in such lighting will not work, but you can see all the surroundings quite clearly.
Sun at the time of death
Searching for an answer to the question: “What does the Sun look like from space?”, Few people thought about what awaits this star in the distant future. And it's not very rosy. According to scientists, in about five billion years, the dwarf will begin to decay: its size will increase until the outer layers reach the Earth's orbit. And as a result of such an expansion, the atmosphere of our Blue Planet will simply burn out. And the Sun itself will turn into a white dwarf, that is, it will become a dense and very hot cosmic object.
Scientists believe that after rebirth, the Sun will look like HD 184738 - a star, about the mass of our star. It is located in the constellation Cygnus. The telescope detected orange and red hues caused by the burning of nitrogen and hydrogen. Such a life path is typical for small and medium stars.
NASA on the Sun
A few years ago, NASA launched a program to combine all the information received by different observatories about our star. By this point, scientists already had several million images of the dwarf.
Perhaps that's why NASA decided to collect all the most interesting images of the Sun and combine them into a video. You can see giant loops, spots and other mysterious phenomena in it, many of which are still unrevealed.
Sunrise on Mars
Sunrise at the bottom of one of the canyons of the Labyrinth of Night in the province of Tharsis on Mars. The reddish color of the sky is given by dust scattered in the atmosphere, consisting mainly of "rust" - iron oxides (if you apply automatic color correction in a photo editor to real photographs taken by rovers, the sky on them will become a "normal" blue color. Surface stones, however, at the same time, they will acquire a greenish tint, which is not true, so it’s correct after all, as it is here). This dust scatters and partially refracts light, as a result, a blue halo appears around the Sun in the sky.
Dawn on Io
Sunrise on Io, moon of Jupiter. The snow-like surface in the foreground is composed of sulfur dioxide crystals ejected to the surface by geysers like the one now visible below the near horizon. There is no atmosphere that creates turbulence, so the geyser has such a regular shape.
Dawn on Mars
Solar eclipse on Callisto.
It is the most distant of the four large moons of Jupiter. It is smaller than Ganymede, but larger than Io and Europa. Callisto is also covered with a crust of ice in half with rocks, under which there is an ocean of water (the closer to the outskirts of the solar system, the greater the proportion of oxygen in the matter of the planets, and, therefore, water), however, this satellite practically does not torment tidal interactions, therefore the surface ice can reach a hundred kilometers thick, and there is no volcanism, so the presence of life here is unlikely. In this image, we are looking at Jupiter from a position of about 5° from the north pole of Callisto. The sun will soon emerge from behind the right edge of Jupiter; and its rays are refracted by the atmosphere of a giant planet. The blue dot to the left of Jupiter is the Earth, the yellowish one to the right is Venus, and to the right and above it is Mercury. The whitish band behind Jupiter is not the Milky Way, but a disk of gas and dust in the ecliptic plane of the inner solar system, known to terrestrial observers as the "zodiacal light"
Jupiter - satellite view of Europa
Jupiter's crescent slowly hovers over Europa's horizon. The eccentricity of its orbit is constantly perturbed due to orbital resonance with Io, which is now just passing in the background of Jupiter. The tidal warp is causing Europa's surface to become deeply cracked and provide heat to the moon, stimulating underground geological processes, allowing the subsurface ocean to remain liquid.
Sunrise on Mercury.
The disk of the sun from Mercury looks three times larger than from Earth, and many times brighter, especially in the airless sky.
Given the slow rotation of this planet, before that, for several weeks from the same point, it was possible to observe the solar corona slowly crawling out from behind the horizon.
Triton
A full Neptune in the sky is the only source of light for Triton's night side. The thin line across Neptune's disk is its rings edge-on, and the dark circle is the shadow of Triton itself. The opposite edge of the depression in the middle plan is about 15 kilometers away.
Sunrise on Triton looks no less impressive:
"Summer" on Pluto.
Despite its small size and great distance from the Sun, Pluto has an atmosphere at times. This happens when Pluto, moving in its elongated orbit, comes closer to the Sun than Neptune. During this approximately twenty-year period, part of the methane-nitrogen ice on its surface evaporates, enveloping the planet in an atmosphere that rivals that of Mars in density. On February 11, 1999, Pluto once again crossed the orbit of Neptune and again became further from it from the Sun (and would now be the ninth planet, the farthest from the Sun, if in 2006, with the adoption of the definition of the term "planet", it had not been "demoted") . Now until 2231, it will be an ordinary (albeit the largest) frozen Kuiper belt planetoid - dark, covered with an armor of frozen gases, in places acquiring a reddish tint from interaction with gamma rays from outer space.
Dangerous Dawn on Gliese 876d
Danger in itself can carry dawns on the planet Gliese 876d. Although, in fact, none of humanity knows the real conditions on this planet. It orbits at a very close distance from the variable star, the red dwarf Gliese 876. This image shows how the artist imagined them. The mass of this planet is several times greater than the mass of the Earth, and the size of its orbit is smaller than the orbit of Mercury. Gliese 876d rotates so slowly that the conditions on this planet are very different day and night. It can be assumed that strong volcanic activity is possible on Gliese 876d, caused by gravitational tides, which deforms and heats the planet, and itself intensifies during the daytime.
Sunsets are beautiful from anywhere in the solar system. And while we'll never be able to enjoy them in person, satellites, telescopes, and computer simulations provide breathtaking views.
The closest planet to the Sun is Mercury. The solar disk is about three times larger than on Earth. Night temperature: -180 °С, daytime: +430 °С.
The second planet from the Sun is Venus. You will not see the sun from the surface due to dense clouds of sulfuric acid, the pressure will squeeze your eyes out, and the temperature is even higher than on Mercury (+480 ° C), so you are unlikely to have time to see anything.
And here is the third planet from the Sun. How do you like the rare angle?
The red planet is Mars. The sun on Mars is 1.5 times smaller. The sunset is not red, as on Earth, but bluish. The reason for this color of the sky is the same that on Earth gives a blue sky and a red sunset - Rayleigh scattering ... The difference between the color of the sky at noon and at sunset is in the volume of the atmosphere that the sun's rays overcome. On Mars, the atmosphere is a hundred times thinner than on Earth, but when the Sun is near the horizon, light travels thirty times as thick as at noon.
Jupiter is the largest planet in our system in every sense. A giant gas ball, inside which hydrogen acquires metallic properties. The sun is 5.2 times smaller. However, Jupiter gives off more heat than it receives from outside. And here is the satellite view of Europe:
Lord of the Rings - Saturn. The most beautiful planet in the solar system. The size of the solar disk is on average 9.5 times (!) smaller than ours. Also, the gas giant emits more heat than it receives from the Sun.
Uranus is a truly unique planet. Uranus is unique in its location, its axis is tilted 98 degrees, which causes the planet to orbit on its side. In this position, the main flow of solar energy is directed to the regions of the poles, but contrary to logical conclusions, the temperature at the equator has higher rates. The direction of rotation of the ice giant is the reverse of its orbital motion. Uranus makes one revolution in 84 Earth years, and a day passes in 17 hours, this period is calculated approximately due to the uneven movement of the gaseous surface. It is impossible to imagine how the Sun moves across the sky without boiling the brain (Mercury is even worse). And here is the satellite view of Ariel:
Neptune is a blue giant. The winds of Neptune have a unique speed, the average is 1000 km / h, and gusts during a hurricane are 2400 km / h. Air masses move against the axis of rotation of the planet. An inexplicable fact is the intensification of storms and winds, which is observed with an increase in the distance between the planet and the Sun. Attention! The sun is 30 times smaller than the earth. Not the best place to watch the sunset, but here's a view from Triton:
Well, and our little brother, whom everyone offends - the dwarf planet Pluto. It is 40 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, so little solar energy and light comes here that our luminary can be confused with a large star. Pluto and its satellite Charon revolve around each other, and Pluto's orbit is sharply inclined relative to the rest of the planets. A year on Pluto is 248 Earth years. A day is almost a week. The surface temperature ranges from -228 to -238°C.
