SUN AND STARS

SUN AND STARS FACTS

1. The brightest star in the night sky is Sirius, in the constellation Canis, Major, the Great Dog.
2. It would take over a million Earths to fill a sphere the size of the sun.
3. Gases boiled off from the sun flow past the Earth, forming the solar wind. In a sense, we live inside the thin outer atmosphere of the Sun.
4. The Sun takes 220 million years to orbit the centre of the galaxy. So far, its been around the galaxy about 20 times. 
5. The temperature at the centre of the Sun is 15 million °C (30 million °F). A pinhead at this temperature would incinerate everything for several kilometers around.
6. Red supergiant stars are huge, but their outer layers are very rarefied - far thinner, in fact, than Earths atmosphere. The outer layers of a red supergiant are, in effect, a red hot vacuum.
7. About ten stars are born each year in our galaxy. That's almost one a month. But a similar number of stars die each year.
8. The farthest object visible to the naked eye is the Andromeda galaxy, 2.2 million light years away. 
9. When the Sun colapses in will retain its enormous mass but will have the approximate volume of the Earth. At this stage it is known as a white dwarf.
10.  The Suns mass is equal to about 333,060 Earths.

I hope you enjoyed these facts, check out the International Space Station live feed for some amazing views of the Earth: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream