New research suggests that all stars may have started out with a companion. Most stars have a companion, with some part of a triple or even a quadruple system.īut it may not have always been a solo star. While the sun is typical in most respects, it does have one quality that stands out from the majority of stars - it is a loner. Later, the sun will shed its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula and leaving behind a dead core of mostly carbon and oxygen - a very dense and hot white dwarf star, about the size of the Earth. These elements will collect in the center of the sun. The sun's helium will get hot enough to burn into carbon, and the carbon will combine with the helium to form oxygen. The sun will puff up into a red giant and expand past the orbit of the inner planets, including Earth. In about 5 billion years, scientists think the sun will start to use up all of the hydrogen at its center. Stars generally get bigger as they grow older. Actually, the sun - like other G-type stars - is white, but appears yellow through Earth's atmosphere. The sun is classified as a G-type main-sequence star, or G dwarf star, or more imprecisely, a yellow dwarf. (Image credit: Paul Beck (KU Leuven, Belgium)) Yellow dwarf The red giant has more than 5 solar radii. This artist’s illustration compares the sizes of the sun and a red giant star.
While that sounds like a lot, it's only about 0.05 percent of the star's total mass. The powerhouse of the star converts more than 4 million tons of solar material into energy every second, Plait said.Īltogether, Plait estimated that the sun has lost a total of 10 24tons of material over its 4.5-billion-year lifetime, or more than 100 times the mass of the Earth. Meanwhile, in the heart of the star, mass is converted into energy. According to ”Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait, the sun loses an average 1.5 million tons of material every second to the solar wind. Over time, the solar wind has carried particles, and thus mass, away from the star.
#How many kilometers in a meter plus#
Lissauer, authors of the textbook " Planetary Sciences," to refer to the solar system as "the sun plus some debris.īut the sun's weight isn't constant. The sun contains 99.8 percent of the mass of the entire solar system, leading astronomers Imke de Pater and Jack J. The mass of the sun is 1.989 x 10 30 kilograms, about 333,000 times the mass of the Earth. About 1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun. The total volume of the sun is 1.4 x 10 27cubic meters.
"But the closer you get to the edge of the path, the more risk you take." Mass and volume "For most people, yes, it doesn't really matter it won't change everything," Jubier said. That could be a problem if you are planning to skirt the edges of the next solar eclipse. Wright said different papers using a variety of methods have produced results that differ by as much as 930 miles (1,500 km). "Similarly, with the Mercury and Venus transits, it turns out not quite as precise as you'd like it to be." "It's harder than you think just to put a ruler on these images and figure out how big the sun is - doesn't have enough precision to nail this down," NASA researcher Ernie Wright told. But when he matched actual photos and historical observations with the models, he found precise eclipse shapes only made sense if he scaled up the sun's radius by a few hundred kilometers.Įven missions like NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and measurements of the inner planets across the face of the sun don't refine the star's radius as precisely as desired.
Xavier Jubier, an engineer and solar eclipse researcher, creates detailed models of solar and lunar eclipses to determine precisely where the moon's shadow would fall during the solar eclipse. It is commonly used officially for expressing distances between geographical places on land in most of the world.It's possible that the sun is even larger than previously thought. The kilometer (symbol: km) is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to 1000m (also written as 1E+3m). It is defined as "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second." In 1799, France start using the metric system, and that is the first country using the metric. The meter (symbol: m) is the fundamental unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). One Meters is equivalent to zero point zero zero one Kilometers. To find out how many Meters in Kilometers, multiply by the conversion factor or use the Length converter above. The conversion factor from Meters to Kilometers is 0.001. In this case we should multiply 1 Meters by 0.001 to get the equivalent result in Kilometers:ġ Meters is equivalent to 0.001 Kilometers. To calculate 1 Meters to the corresponding value in Kilometers, multiply the quantity in Meters by 0.001 (conversion factor).