We See It Every Day

and without it, we die,

the Sun, our Sun, which is a yellow dwarf star, a hot ball of glowing gases at the heart of our solar system. Its gravity holds the solar system together, keeping everything – from the biggest planets to the smallest particles of debris – in its orbit. The connection and interactions between the Sun and Earth drive the seasons, ocean currents, weather, climate, radiation belts and auroras. Though it is special to us, there are billions of stars like our Sun scattered across the Milky Way galaxy, the Sun has many names in many cultures. The Latin word for Sun is “sol,” which is the main adjective for all things Sun-related: solar, with a radius of 432,168.6 miles (695,508 kilometers), our Sun is not an especially large star—many are several times bigger—but it is still far more massive than our home planet: 332,946 Earths match the mass of the Sun. The Sun’s volume would need 1.3 million Earths to fill it,

this illustration shows the approximate size of Earth compared to the Sun. Image Credit: ESA & NASA, the Sun is 93 million miles (150 million kilometres) from Earth. Its nearest stellar neighbor is the Alpha Centauri triple star system: Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light years away, and Alpha Centauri A and B—two stars orbiting each other—are 4.37 light years away, in case you do not know, a light year is the distance light travels in one year, which is equal to 5,878,499,810,000 miles or 9,460,528,400,000 kilometres, so why all the fuss over the Sun?

well because of this, a new timelapse from NASA, lets viewers peer into the fiery mass for an entire decade. During the course of ten years, the Solar Dynamics Observatory took more than 425 million images of the massive star that were captured .75 seconds apart. Aggregated into an hour-long compilation titled “A Decade of Sun,” the photographs provide visual evidence of how the giant orb functions and its influence on the rest of the solar system. Each image was captured at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter, to show the exterior atmospheric layer that’s called the corona, NASA has shared on YouTube a list of notable moments, including an appearance by Venus and an iconic interruption in 2012. Most of the dark spots in the video are a result of the earth or moon passing in between the Solar Dynamics Observatory and blocking its view, although there was a longer lapse in 2016 due to an equipment malfunction. When the spacecraft was re-calibrating its tools, the sun shifts to one side of the screen, for more views of NASA's explorations into outer space pop over to YouTube, what an amazing video, especially when we are told so many times not to look directly into the Sun!