A few weeks ago, I made an observation of the Sun where I described how our Sun was made and more. This will be a continuation of that.
First off, let's talk about the picture. This picture was taken in Switzerland on January 5 as the Sun was setting. This is a pretty average representation of the Sun; big, yellow, and amazing, if I do say so myself. Now looking at it closer, you may see a blemish on the photo. This, however, is not the camera's fault. Those dots on the Sun are what are called sunspots. Sunspots are dark spots on the Sun which are cooler than the rest of the Sun or the photosphere. Cooler that is being at about 3,800 K while the photosphere has a temperature of about 5,800 K. So that is still very hot! These things however, can get big like around 10,000 kilometers long.
So how are sunspots really made?
Well, it involves intense magnetic fields. First, think of your typical magnet, negative on one side and positive on the other. Now think of it 1000 times stronger. This is just a simplified version of the Sun's magnetic field. Well, the sunspots are disturbed places on the photosphere where this internal magnetic field reaches the surface and jets out of one sunspot and enters into another one, which is why you usually see a group of sunspots. This means that there can also be solar flares which are loops or streams of gas being emitted from the Sun into space. These spots can last from 1 to 100 days and as I had mentioned before, these spots can be very big.
Relating this back to the picture, this sunspot that you see is so big that it can not only be seen from Earth, it is also 11 times bigger than our meager little planet! The sunspot is said to eject a solar flare that would reach the Earth, but don't worry, that doesn't mean that our planet is going to go up in flames. It actually means there will be auroras up in the north. This, however, happened on January 7.
There are still so many things that I have not even got into about the Sun alone which comes to show how mysterious of a place we live in.
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