Gravity compresses the Sun making it heat up inside: the particles move faster and the nuclear fusion proceeds at a more rapid rate. That produces an outward pressure that makes the Sun expand and cool back down again. Ken Lang, author
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Samuel Beckett, Murphy, 1938
On Earth we’re actually only receiving about one two-billionth of the energy that’s being produced by the Sun. Holly Gilbert, NASA/Goddard Space Centre
The entire surface of the Earth will be incinerated. Craig DeForest, Southwest Research Institute
The sun is a White Star ... received by our retina and our brain as white. Alex Filippenko
The sun now is about four and a half billion years old. It’s slightly under half its anticipated lifetime. Alex Filippenko
Make hay while the sun shines. Mid-16th century proverb
The Sun Also Rises. Ernest Hemingway
The power of that explosion can cause the Sun to shudder. As the magnetic loops break and explode, billions of tons of hot gas come crashing into the surface causing a sun-quake. Extreme Universe: Time Bombs, National Geographic 2010
It’s so big you could fit a million Earths inside it. It’s so heavy its gravity controls the entire solar system. Journey to the Edge of the Universe, National Geographic 2008
Einstein’s equation showed what was powering the Sun. In the Sun’s core, mass was continually being converted to energy. A process that can be sustained for billions of years. Horizon: Einstein’s Equation of Life and Death, BBC 2005
September 12th 2001: the aftermath of tragedy. While America mourned, the weather all over the country was unusually fine. 800 miles west of New York in Madison Wisconsin a climate scientist called David Travis was on his way to work. For fifteen years Travis had been researching an apparently obscure topic – whether the vapour trails left by aircraft were having a significant effect on the climate. In the aftermath of 9/11 the entire US fleet was grounded. And Travis finally had a chance to find out ... What he observed was both immediate and dramatic. One degree in just three days ... Scientists called it global dimming. Horizon: Global Dimming, BBC 2005
Between the 1950s and the early 1990s the level of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface had dropped ... 10% in the USA, by almost 30% in Russia ... This was a truly global phenomenon. ibid.
Global dimming was not the only phenomenon that didn’t seem to fit with global warming. In Australia two more biologists, Michael Roderick and Graham Farquhar, were intrigued by another paradoxical result – the worldwide decline in something called the Pan Evaporation Rate ... In the 1990s scientists spotted something very strange – the rate of evaporation was falling. ibid.
The culprit had to be here on Earth. And as they searched for clues they would make another startling discovery. Global dimming is a killer. It may have been behind the worst climatic disasters of recent times, responsible for famine and death on a Biblical scale. And global dimming is poised to strike again. ibid.
A 10% fall in sunlight meant that particle pollution was having a far greater effect than anyone had thought. ibid.
But the problem Travis faced was to establish exactly how big an effect the contrails were having. ibid.
This is the real sting in the tail – solve the problem of global dimming and the world could get considerably hotter. ibid.
Eddington suggested that the sun shines by combining hydrogen into helium, releasing the missing mass as energy. Horizon: Can We Make a Star on Earth? BBC 2009
The Little Ice Age ... The coldest winter ever recorded was in 1683/4 ... Why did the sun’s spots disappear for fifty-odd years? Horizon: Global Weirding, BBC 2012
Something is stirring on the face of our nearest star. Something powerful and unsettling. To understand what’s coming our way, they are doing something we cannot – stare directly into the sun. What they are expecting in the next year are colossal eruptions from the sun that fling billions of tons of plasma towards our planet. Our high-tech society has never been so vulnerable. Horizon: Solar Storms – The Threat to Planet Earth, BBC 2012
So why is it that some sunspots just pass calmly across the sun’s surface while others erupt? ibid.
It is this snap that ultimately propels a solar storm from the sun’s surface. ibid
The Sun: What does its future hold? … They foresee an apocalyptic future. Horizon: The End of the Solar System, BBC 2016
‘Over a million Earths could fit inside the Sun’. ibid. Schafer
The Andromeda Galaxy – scientists have long suspected it will one day crash into our galaxy the Milky Way … The Solar System will survive. ibid.
The Sun would return our atoms to interstellar worlds. ibid.
Giant prominences erupt from its surface. They could swallow the Earth dozens of times over. Like giant fingers they stretch for millions of miles into the vacuum of space. Universe: Stars
The Sun’s raging surface is turbulent. Its eruptions ripped and torn by enormous magnetic fields. Soho revealed that like the Earth the Sun has weather: gigantic solar tornadoes twist through its atmosphere. And gigantic shockwaves ripple across its surface. The surface of the Sun is heaving. Every five minutes the entire star breathes in and out. Our Sun is pulsating. ibid.
Every eleven years the sunspots increase in number and size. ibid.
The Sun is the superpower of the our solar system. A thermonuclear blast furnace erupting with massive explosions. The Universe s1e1: Secrets of the Sun, 2007
Our Sun is a type of star known as a Yellow Dwarf. ibid.
It’s been burning this way for billions of years. ibid.
The Sun’s magnetic field is a tangled web. ibid.
The claim that our Sun has an undiscovered companion death star is controversial. The Universe s2e11: Unexplained Mysteries, History 2008
The Surface of the Sun: This may look like a ball of flames but its surface is an ocean of ten-thousand-degree plasma, with waves, winds and massive eruptions as explosive as a billion tons of TNT. The Universe s5e1: Seven Wonders of the Solar System (2)
CMEs – Coronal Mass Ejections – these hot bubbles of ionised gas contain up to ten billion tons of material. They shoot out into space at speeds of several million miles an hour ... They can trigger geomagnetic storms ... They are extremely dangerous for astronauts ... Our sun’s surface is a force to be reckoned with. ibid.
Solar Activity runs through an eleven year cycle. In 2013 our sun will be at the peak of this cycle. ibid.
Solar magnetism: Why is it so deadly and so misunderstood? And is there anything we can do to escape the magnetic storm? The Universe s5e3: Magnetic Storms
A new generation of solar satellites has revealed just how big these solar flares are and how vulnerable are planet is. ibid.
The key component of magnetism is that it attracts and repels. ibid.
The only thing that keeps people from walking through walls or falling through the floor is magnetism. Molecules and atoms are extremely small, and the space between atoms is extremely large. At an atomic level almost everything is made up of empty space. It’s not the atoms themselves but the magnetic field that makes matter solid, that keeps a person from walking through walls. ibid.
Solar magnetic storms pose a disturbing threat to life on our planet. ibid.
All solar activity is basically magnetic activity. The sun’s magnetism is created by the movement of super-heated plasma as it ripples across the surface of our home star. ibid.
Something far more dramatic – a solar flare. ibid.
A total eclipse: the brilliant sun suddenly obliterated by the black disc of the moon. The Universe s5e7: Total Eclipse
A total eclipse of the sun can be seen somewhere on Earth once every sixteen months. Predicting them is now a very exact science. ibid.
Eclipses happen everywhere. ibid.
The Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size in the sky. ibid.
In 1971 a Nasa satellite snapped … an explosion in the corona no-one had seen before. The solar particles speed to the Earth ... Coronal Mass Ejections ... Currently the most powerful known explosion in the solar system. ibid.
1859: Disrupting telegraph service and creating auroras visible down to the equator. ibid.