This Sun-in-our-solar-system page and the entire website are excerpted from You and the Universe, a handmade, individualized fine art book on astrology, mythology and astronomy through which the recipient's complete astrological reading is woven.

The Sun is 864,000 miles in diameter, and is composed of 75% hydrogen and 25% helium. It contains 99.8% of all of the mass in the solar system—the planets and everything else amounting to 1/500th of the total. On the surface of the Sun the temperature is 9600° Fahrenheit (5,800° on the absolute Kelvin scale), but in the corona—which extends out for millions of miles and is only visible during eclipses—the temperature is over one million degrees Kelvin!

The Sun, its planets, asteroids, comets, and other gravitationally held bodies are collectively known as the solar system (literally, the system of "Sol," Roman god of the Sun and similar to the Greek god Helios). In Scandinavia, she was also know as Sol, or Glory-of-Elves. The ancient Viking poems prophesy that on doomsday the Sun will bear a daughter who will be the new Sun, the luminous world to come.

At the Sun’s core the temperature is 15.6 million degrees, the pressure is 250 billion times the pressure at sea level on Earth, and the density is more than 150 times that of water. The pressure is so great at the center of the Sun that there the lightest gas in the universe, hydrogen, is 14 times denser than lead!

The Sun emits 386 billion billion (not a typo!) megawatts every second. The entire Earth would need one million years to make that much energy at current rates. Every second 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted by nuclear fusion to about 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons of gamma ray energy. Since its birth 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun has burned up about half of the hydrogen in its core. It will continue to burn as it does now for about another five billion years, during which time it will become twice as bright. Eventually it will run out of hydrogen, undergoing changes that will totally destroy the Earth.

In addition to light and heat, the Sun continuously emits a million-mile per-hour stream of electrically charged particles called the solar wind. To read more about the solar wind, the heliosphere, and its interaction with the solar wind of other stars in our galaxy (causing the heliopause), click here.