Sol

From Slackerpedia Galactica

Ra.

The Sun (aka Sol) is a really big and really hot ball of gas - kind of like Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken. Well, it is technically a ball of mostly plasma in the middle of the solar system. (Although Rush likes to think he is the center of all things...) People thought that the sun orbited Earth but some other guys (Copernicus, Johannes Kepler) set them straight and proved that all the planets orbited around it instead.

Do not look directly at the Sun, with or without protective eyewear. That is, unless you are campaigning for a Darwin Award.

The Sun fuses Hydrogen into Helium in its core, releasing great amounts of energy. This energy slowly exits the star via the random walk, a process which can take up to ten million years. Then it takes about 8 minutes to reach the Earth. On a typically sunny day, the amount of energy reaching your body from the Sun in 1 second is around 3 nonillionth (0.0000000000000000000000000000003ths) of the energy created by the Sun, or roughly 400 watts.

The Sun from space - notice how it's white, not yellow? This is because the blue hasn't been removed by our atmosphere via Rayleigh scattering.

1 Companion?
2 Future
3 Cycle
4 Nearby Stars
5 External Links

Companion?

Some people believe that the sun has a companion star and that the reason that it has not been seen is because it is a brown dwarf. However, this theory is not generally considered credible.

Future

The Sun will slowly heat up over the next 4 billion years, but not enough to really notice. However, eventually it will become hot enough in the core for Helium to fuse. Then it will swell into a red giant. This will engulf Mercury and Venus. As for the Earth, it may or may not engulf us too - but it certainly will destroy the atmosphere.

The Sun will pulsate as a red giant for a couple hundred million years. In the process it will shed its outer layers and create beautiful nebulae for any possible neighboring emerging civilizations to look at. Eventually all the outer layers will be blown off leaving only a small, dense white dwarf.

Over trillions of years, the white dwarf will slowly cool into a dark, burnt out ember of Carbon in space. Meanwhile, the nebulae will disperse into the ISM and sow the seeds for other star formation.

Cycle

The Solar Conveyer Belt. It causes the solar cycle, including sun spots, flares and more. (NASA).

The Sun operates on a cycle with an average length of around 22 years. Once per cycle the magnetic field flips North-South and back again. Each flip is signified by a 11-year subcycle during which the Sun goes from being very active, to calm, and back again.

Basically, this means that every 11 years the Sun goes nuts, satellites are damaged and sales of telescopic solar filters soar. The details of the cycle were discussed in the Slackerpedia Galactica 4.0 audio podcast.