The Sun

I am a giant, swirling ball of fire, so big you could fit a million Earths inside me. From my home at the very center of our cosmic neighborhood, I watch a family of planets spin around me in a graceful, endless dance. I send out warmth that you can feel on your skin from 93 million miles away, and my brilliant light chases away the shadows of night, painting your sky blue every morning. For all of human history, you have looked up and wondered about me. You’ve used my light to tell time and my warmth to grow your food. I am the reason you have seasons, and my energy fuels almost everything on your beautiful world. I am the star you know best. I am the Sun.

My story began a very, very long time ago, about 4.6 billion years in the past. Before I was a star, I was just a small part of an enormous, cold cloud of floating gas and dust called a nebula. It was dark and quiet. But then, a powerful force called gravity started working its magic. Like a giant, invisible hand, gravity began pulling all that gas and dust together, squeezing it tighter and tighter into a spinning ball. As I spun faster, the pressure in my center built up, and I started to get hot. I grew hotter and hotter for millions of years, until the very core of me was so incredibly hot and squeezed that—WHOOSH. I burst into light. A powerful reaction called nuclear fusion began, and I was born as a star. The leftover bits of dust and gas from that great cloud began clumping together to form my companions: the planets, including your Earth.

Ever since my birth, I have been the anchor of the solar system. My immense gravity holds all the planets, from tiny Mercury to giant Jupiter, in their orbits, keeping them from flying off into the cold, dark space. For thousands of years, people on Earth looked up at me with a mix of awe and wonder. They knew I was important. In ancient Egypt, people saw me as a powerful god named Ra, who sailed across the sky each day in a golden boat. For a long time, people believed that I, along with everything else in the sky, circled around the Earth. But then, curious minds began to solve my riddles. In 1543 CE, a brilliant astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a revolutionary idea. He suggested that Earth and the other planets were the ones moving, traveling in circles around me. This changed everything. A little later, around the year 1610 CE, another scientist named Galileo Galilei used a new invention, the telescope, to get a closer look. He saw that my face wasn't perfect and smooth. It had dark patches on it, which we now call sunspots. His discovery proved I was a dynamic, changing place, not just a flawless ball of light in the sky.

For centuries, people wondered what made me shine so brightly and for so long. Was I just a big ball of fire, burning like wood? No, that couldn't be right; I would have burned out long ago. The real answer was discovered in 1925 CE by a remarkable astronomer named Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. After studying my light very carefully, she figured out that I am not made of the same stuff as Earth. I am made almost entirely of two of the lightest gases in the universe: hydrogen and helium. My core is like a giant engine, hotter and more pressured than you can imagine. In that core, I am constantly taking tiny hydrogen atoms and smashing them together so hard that they fuse into helium atoms. This process, called nuclear fusion, releases a tremendous amount of energy. That energy, in the form of light and heat, takes thousands of years to journey from my core to my surface. Then, it zips across space at the speed of light, reaching Earth in just eight minutes to warm your face on a sunny day.

Today, people on Earth understand me better than ever before, but they are still full of questions. Scientists study me with incredible tools, from giant telescopes on Earth to robotic spacecraft that travel through the solar system. One brave little spacecraft, the Parker Solar Probe, which launched on August 12th, 2018, is on a mission to fly closer to me than anything from Earth ever has. It is flying right through my super-hot outer atmosphere, called the corona, to learn my deepest secrets. My light does more than just brighten your day. It powers homes and schools through solar panels, and it gives plants the energy they need to grow, providing the food that you eat. Every morning when I appear on the horizon, I bring the promise of a new day and a reminder of the amazing, vast universe we all share. I will keep shining for billions more years, a constant friend to your planet, providing warmth, energy, and wonder.