Welcome to the Sun!
You are at stop #1 on Plymouth PTA’s Mission: Planet Exploration, a driving tour of the solar system designed to scale based on a 6-foot sun at Plymouth Elementary School! Click on Mission: Planet Exploration for more info, including maps to all 8 planets.
Image Credit: NASA
the heart of our solar system
Our Sun is a hot ball of glowing gases, and it’s been around for 4.5 billion years! It may be hard to believe, but there are billions of stars like our sun throughout the Milky Way galaxy. And just as we orbit the Sun, the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way… it just takes 230 million years to make it around once!
The surface of the Sun—the part we can see—is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to make a diamond, not just melt, but boil. But that’s nothing compared to its core where temperatures reach 27 million degrees Fahrenheit!
Oh, and the Sun is so big, 1.3 million Earths can fit inside it!
Find more kid-friendly facts about the Sun at the NASA Science Space Place.
More in-depth information about the Sun can be found at NASA Science Solar System Exploration.