And compared with their normal life spans of several
So our Sun is about halfway through its life. But don't worry. It still has about 5,000,000,000—five billion—years to go. When those five billion years are up, the Sun will become a red giant.
The Sun is a 4.5 billion-year-old yellow dwarf star – a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium – at the center of our solar system. It's about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth and it's our solar system's only star. Without the Sun's energy, life as we know it could not exist on our home planet.
The Sun and the planets formed together, 4.6 billion years ago, from a cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula. A shock wave from a nearby supernova explosion probably initiated the collapse of the solar nebula. The Sun formed in the center, and the planets formed in a thin disk orbiting around it.
The sun, at 4.6 billion years old, predates all the other bodies in our solar system.
All of the planets, except for Earth, were named after Greek and Roman gods and godesses. The name Earth is an English/German name which simply means the ground. It comes from the Old English words 'eor(th)e' and 'ertha'. In German it is 'erde'.
When the Sun exhausts its store of nuclear fuel, some 5 billion years from now, it will evolve into a bloated red giant, gobbling up Mercury and Venus, and scorching the Earth. After ejecting its outer layers in the form of a colourful planetary nebula, the Sun will then be compressed into a tiny white dwarf star.
At the current rate of solar brightening—just over 1% every 100 million years—Earth would suffer this "runaway greenhouse" in 600 million to 700 million years. Earth will suffer some preliminary effects leading up to that, too.
Within a few days, however, the temperatures would begin to drop, and any humans left on the planet's surface would die soon after. Within two months, the ocean's surface would freeze over, but it would take another thousand years for our seas to freeze solid.
What is the gender of the sun? The Sun has no gender, but is usually referred in the masculine gender with the Moon being referred in the feminine. In many cultures the Sun is considered as a masculine deity as well.
Our Sun May Have Been Born With a Trouble-Making Twin Called 'Nemesis' A recent model on how stars are formed adds weight to the hypothesis that most – if not all – stars are born in a litter with at least one sibling.
As the goddess of the sky, Nut swallowed the sun in the evening and gave birth to it again in the morning. Nut was also represented as a cow, for this was the form she took in order to carry the sun god Re on her back to the sky.
One of the main environmental factors that ages our skin is ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun. In fact, it's estimated that 90% of skin aging is due to the effects of the sun! ¹ The sun causes proteins in our skin to deteriorate, leading to the loss of our youthful appearance over time.
Eventually (in five or seven billion years time), the Sun's life will come to an end. Our star will swell up, becoming something called a “Red Giant” star.
Based on observations of other stars, astronomers predict it will reach the end of its life in about another 10 billion years. There are other things that will happen along the way, of course. In about 5 billion years, the Sun is due to turn into a red giant.
By 2050 , the world's population will exceed at least 9 billion and by 2050 the population of India will exceed that of China. By 2050, about 75% of the world population will be living in cities. Then there will be buildings touching the sky and cities will be settled from the ground up.
According to reports, there have been five major incidents where humans came close to extinction. Around 75,000 years ago, the Toba volcano in Indonesia erupted.
Humans have certainly had a profound effect on their environment, but our current claim to dominance is based on criteria that we have chosen ourselves. Ants outnumber us, trees outlive us, fungi outweigh us. Bacteria win on all of these counts at once.
Earth isn't likely to ever get tidally locked to the sun — we're too far away for that to happen. And, though our planet's rotation is slowing down ever so slightly (a day gets about 1.7 milliseconds longer every century), our planet should never stop spinning completely. That's something to be thankful for.
It is the pull of the Moon's gravity on the Earth that holds our planet in place. Without the Moon stabilising our tilt, it is possible that the Earth's tilt could vary wildly. It would move from no tilt (which means no seasons) to a large tilt (which means extreme weather and even ice ages).
If Earth had two moons, it would be catastrophic. An extra moon would lead to larger tides and wipe out major cities like New York and Singapore. The extra pull of the moons would also slow down the Earth's rotation, causing the day to get longer.
Nearly 4 billion years ago, during the Late Heavy Bombardment, countless meteors rained down on the Earth and the Moon. Over time, these icy asteroids and comets delivered oceans to Earth, depositing the water directly to the surface.
The name used in Western academia during the Renaissance was Tellus Mater or Terra Mater, the Latin for “earth mother”, i.e. “Mother Earth”, goddess of the earth in ancient Roman religion and mythology.
Formation. When the solar system settled into its current layout about 4.5 billion years ago, Earth formed when gravity pulled swirling gas and dust in to become the third planet from the Sun. Like its fellow terrestrial planets, Earth has a central core, a rocky mantle, and a solid crust.