Mr. Hyde is alive and well

I’ve been pretending to be a big, important businessman the last week, hence, my reticence. So in order to get things fired up again, I’m dedicating this entry to the Sun. I’ve made the command decision that the Sun is one of the sweetest things I know about (aside from the other 200 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of an estimated 500 billion galaxies). I really am starting to think that an enormous, glowing ball of chaotic, fiery wrath tearing through the fabric of space is an unusual thing. The little research I’ve done has freaked me out even more. Here’s what I found:

• The sun contains 98 percent of all the mass in the solar system
• 109 earths could be lined up from one side of the sun to the other side
• If earths were packed inside the sun like marbles, you could fit 1 million in that shell; if, however, you ground earth up into a pile of pourable dirt with the same original volume as our round earth, you could stuff the equivalent of 1.3 million earths into the fishbowl sun.
  Mind blowing side note: Some stars are 500 times bigger than the sun
• The ‘corona’ is the funky halo surrounding the sun and reaching out into the solar system, cheers!
• The pressure at the sun’s core is 340 billion times earth’s air pressure at sea level…you and I and a 1000 cubic foot block of steel would basically disappear
• The sun has roughly reached it’s half-life…having lived for 4.6 billion years, with enough fuel left to roast for another 5 billion….and that’s when the creepy thing happens: near the end of it’s modest lifetime, the sun will start to swell, ultimately expanding enough to swallow the earth….after this billion year period of portliness, it will go on a crack-diet and shrivel up into a tiny little white dwarf. Don’t worry though, it’s still gonna be warming our extinct toes for another trillion years or so before it completely cools off.
• To put into perspective how far away the sun is from earth, consider this: light travels around the earth roughly seven times in one second, but it takes light over eight minutes to reach the earth… so if the sun explodes or implodes, we’ll live happily for another eight minutes, not realizing that certain death is reaching its gnarled fingers out across space towards our unsuspecting masses. Another freakoid-factoid: once i decided i had no idea how to grasp that kind of distance, i punished myself by finding out how far the next closest star is to the earth. I found that Proxima CentauriAlpha Cen C star is 4.3 light years away from the earth, whereas the sun is a meager 0.00001 light years away from the earth.

The nerdy scientist can only stay hidden for so long (although i'm starting to think he's much cooler, anyways)…stay tuned for more uncontrollable outbreaks in the near future.