THE SUN

THE SUN

This story starts some 4,6 billion years ago. A great big ball of fire was formed, that same ball of fire is what allows us to be alive, now reading this paper. It formed before the rest of the planets in our solar system, including us. But how did this happen?

Well the planets and various moons formed with the collision of asteroids and the effect of gravity along with dust in space, this is also an extense and complicated topic for another time. For now, lets focus on the Sun.

Although it may look empty, space is filled with gas and dust. Most of the material was hydrogen and helium, but some of it was made up of leftover remnants from the violent deaths of stars. About 4.5 billion years ago, waves of energy traveling through space pressed clouds of such particles closer together, and gravity caused them to collapse in on themselves and then start to spin. The spin caused the cloud to flatten into a disk. In the center, the material clumped together to form a protostar that would eventually become the sun.

We've become accustomed to the sun being a part of our everyday lives and we've forgotten the importance it has on us and the complicated process that allowed that big ball of gas to float in the centre of our Solar System and via its Gravitational pull have planets orbiting it.

The heat and light emmited by this is caused by a constant fight between Helium and Hidrogen particles, these particles move around at incredible speeds and crash, creating photons via a process called nuclear fusion, not to be confuised with nuclear fission which is how nuclear energy is formed. These photons move at the speed of light through space in every direction, now since the speed of light is about 300,000 km/s and Earth is 149,6 million therefore the light and heat takes about 8 minutes to reach us, in essence the light we see during the day is from 8 minutes ago, and the light we see during the night thanks to the moon reflecting the suns photons is from about 30 seconds ago.

As I'm sure you know, the Universe is inmense, mysterious and frankly, beautiful. The sun is no exception, to me it's the perfect excuse to take my camera out and take photos of an inevitably beauftiful sky thanks to the earlier mentioned photons. Its aesthetically beautiful and I'll never get tired of photographing it. Here are some of these photos.