The Importance of Sun for the Human Life
Our planet source of energy is the sun. It is the dominant factor of governing our environment providing the light and warmth that makes the earth habitable. It is a yellow dwarf star like billions of others throughout the galaxies. At its surface, temperatures are around 5,000 degrees Kelvin. But the corona, the suns atmosphere has temperature as hot as one million degrees Kelvin.
Our sun is a moderately size star that fuses hydrogen atoms into helium releasing huge amounts of energy in the process. But this only became clear during the 20th century. The most of human history, the sun has been a mystery even worship as a God. Stone Hedge perhaps the world’s most famous prehistoric monument is aligned, so that our midst some as morning, the sun rises directly over the hill stone and the first rays shine into the center of the stone circle. Whoever goat stone hedge had no written language but they have precise knowledge of the path of the sun.
The ancient Egyptians worship the sun as Ra, the sun God. And the Mayans offered human sacrifices to the sun while the ancient Aztecs used it as a basis for an accurate calendar. And until the 16th century, it was thought that the sun over to the earth. The earth is an ideal distance from the sun. Our planet enjoys a temperature range that allows water to exist as ice as water and as water vapor. This is fundamental to the existence of all life.
Warmth from the sun drives weather patterns, the winds and ocean currents. To learn about how near is the star, scientists used instruments like this one at the kit peek observatory in Arizona. It is the largest solar telescope in the world. A two meter mirror attracts the sun sending a beam down the shaft extending 100 meters below ground. The result is a unique high resolution image of the sun almost one meter in diameter. Dr Steven Duvall hopes to get to the causes of solar activity by determining what’s going on in the sun’s interior.
The goal is to be able to predict some of the phenomena associated with solar activity that are troublesome do us on earth. Most of Dr Duvall’s work is done in this 25 meter high solar vacuum telescope. Again, there is a use to reflect an image of the sun down into the instruments control room. Here a daily map of magnetic phenomena on the sun’s surface is produce. Nearly all forms of solar activity from sun’s box to solar flares create magnetic fields. If this disturbance is a strong enough, communications on earth can be disrupted.
At NASA’s Marshall Space flat center, Townsville, Alabama, Richard Hover an astrophysicist studies the sun with X-ray telescopes. This mirror was part of an instrument used on Skylab to produce solar images. Today, the reverence scientists from Stanford University are working with a new generation of X-ray telescope. That producing phenomenal high resolution images revealing solar turbulence is never seen before. Some observations can only be made from space above the distorting affix of the atmosphere. Solar max was launched in 1980 but an instrument malfunction had to be repaired by astronauts before the satellite could monitor the sun at its peak of activity.
When the space shuttle lifted off in October 1990, it carried a European satellite called “Ulysses” designed to go into Polar orbit around the sun. This gives it a view of the sun’s Polar Regions, something we cannot see from the earth. Ulysses elliptical orbit takes it close to the sun every 6.2 years. It is just starting its third orbit at a quite time. The sun goes through in 11 year activity cycle and on Ulysses next pass, it will see a star at a time of maximum activity with violent solar storms and giant flares.
Coronal mass ejections blast huge amounts of charged particles across space carrying shifting electric and magnetic fields because the sun rotates. And the material at the equator spins at a faster rate than material near the poles. The sun’s electrical and magnetic fields near the equator become tangled and complex. Additional complexities originate in the corona. Hear the solar wind springs into beam and blows outward in all directions.
In 1973, Skylab within a ray of solar observation instruments made it possible to see the sun across its full spectrum. Skylab made an important discovery about the corona and the solar wind. There are huge rips in the corona, called coronal holes. These dark patches are areas where vast clouds of solar wind particles have escaped. The particles move at many different speeds, so that the higher energy particles bunged up behind the slower ones. This congestions snout the magnetic field limes around the sun equator into a convoluted tangle that constantly twist the knots and become ever harder to understand.
Ulysses physicists are also studying particles that originate doing solar flares. Solar flares are the most catastrophic and energetic event on the sun. The particles they yield have extremely high energy. These high energy particles explode outwards leaping from one magnetic field line to another to complicated matters around the sun’s equator even more. At the poles, there is less thermion and Ulysses is providing the first ever map of the heliosphere from the equator to the poles.
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