Sun

The Sun is a giant star. It sits in the middle of our Solar System. The Sun is a huge ball of super hot stuff. Inside the Sun, special reactions make it very hot. The Sun sends out light and heat to us every day. Life on Earth needs the Sun to survive.

The Sun is very far away from Earth. Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach us. If you stood next to the Sun, you would burn up instantly. The Sun is about 109 times wider than Earth. That means you could fit over one million Earths inside the Sun. The Sun is so heavy that it weighs as much as 330,000 Earths. Almost everything in our Solar System is made of the Sun.

The Sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago. A huge cloud of dust and gas fell together because of gravity. Most of the stuff gathered in the middle to make the Sun. The leftover stuff spun around and made all the planets. The Sun got so hot that special reactions started inside it. Every single second, the Sun turns a huge amount of hydrogen into helium. This makes the energy that lights and warms our world.

One day, very far in the future, the Sun will change. In about 4 to 7 billion years, the Sun will start to die. It will grow much bigger and turn red. We call this a red giant. After that, the Sun will shrink down into a tiny, very hot ball. It will slowly cool down for trillions of years. Eventually, it will become so cold and dark that it gives off almost no heat.