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The sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. It orbits some 25,000 light-years from the galactic core, completing a revolution once every 250 million years or so. The sun is relatively young, part of a generation of stars known as Population I, which are relatively rich in elements heavier than helium. An older generation of stars is called Population II, and an earlier generation of Population III may have existed, although no members of this generation are known yet.www.space.com/...
The strength of the sun's magnetic field is typically only about twice as strong as Earth's field. However, it becomes highly concentrated in small areas, reaching up to 3,000 times stronger than usual. These kinks and twists in the magnetic field develop because the sun spins more rapidly at the equator than at the higher latitudes and because the inner parts of the sun rotate more quickly than the surface. These distortions create features ranging from sunspots to spectacular eruptions known as flares and coronal mass ejections. Flares are the most violent eruptions in the solar system, while coronal mass ejections are less violent but involve extraordinary amounts of matter — a single ejection can spout roughly 20 billion tons (18 billion metric tons) of matter into space.www.space.com/..
The sun has enough nuclear fuel to stay much as it is now for another 5 billion years. After that, it will swell to become a red giant. Eventually, it will shed its outer layers, and the remaining core will collapse to become a white dwarf. Slowly, this will fade, to enter its final phase as a dim, cool theoretical object sometimes known as a black dwarf.www.space.com/...
The sun and its atmosphere are divided into several zones and layers. The solar interior, from the inside out, is made up of the core, radiative zone and the convective zone. The solar atmosphere above that consists of the photosphere, chromosphere, a transition region and the corona. Beyond that is the solar wind, an outflow of gas from the corona.www.space.com/...
.In 1990, NASA and the European Space Agency launched the Ulysses probe to make the first observations of its polar regions. In 2004, NASA's Genesis spacecraft returned samples of the solar wind to Earth for study. In 2007, NASA's double-spacecraft Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission returned the first three-dimensional images of the sun. NASA lost contact with STEREO-B in 2014, which is remained out of contact except for a brief period in 2016. STEREO-A remains fully functional.www.space.com/...
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Crepuscular rays /krɪˈpʌskjʊlər/ (more commonly known as sunbeams, sun rays, or god rays), in atmospheric optics, are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from the point in the sky where the sun is located.Crepuscular rays - Wikipedia
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