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Book Excerpts
The Sun
In all the talk and discussion about climate change, global warming, carbon dioxide, etc., few people mention the sun. It is quietly assumed to be there, and to
provide a constant amount of heat to the earth in form of radiation (see also the separate section on Radiation). However, nothing could be further from the truth.
To begin with, let us look at the relative sizes of sun and earth. The diameter of the sun is roughly 100 times that of earth. The US National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) has a neat web site to demonstrate that [Source: http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2007/materials /solar_pizza.pdf ]. If the sun is the
size of a medium sized pizza, the earth is the size of a pin head, and the distance between sun and earth is approximately 20 m (65 feet).
The sun is a very large and very hot place. It is an inferno with a surface temperature well over 5,000 °C and a core temperature in the millions of degrees. The
sun gets its heat from the nuclear reaction of hydrogen to helium, in simple terms, continuously exploding hydrogen bombs. These "Solar flares" result in large
perturbances of its surface with protuberances (also termed prominences) extending several hundred thousand kilometers from its surface. The sun is expected to
reach its next maximum in solar flare activity in the year 2012. The figure above shows sunflares.
The opposite event, relatively cool and inactive areas of the sun's surface are known as "sunspots." The figure below shows some such sunspots....
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