For Portuguese-speaking students, like us, the title above is a clotted nonsense. But that is not so for English speaking people. Have you noticed how - strange as it may seem - sometimes they use primitive words coming from Anglo-Germanic and derived words from Latin? Take, for instance, “egg”. They say oval, ovary and ovulation, not “eggal” , “eggary” and “eggulation”, right? There are many words like that. For example: “kidney” and “renal”, “tooth” and “dentist”, “lung” and “pulmonary”, “to last” and “duration”. Well, the same happens with “sun” and “solar”, do you get the picture?
NOW WE’LL ZERO IN ON INFORMATION ABOUT THE SUN
This being so, now let’s zero in on the subject. For many centuries it was believed that our planet, the Earth, was the center of the universe. People believed that the Earth stood still. The stars did all the traveling. How could they be persuaded that both the earth and the numberless heavenly bodies traveled around the sun? Well, the sun is not the center of the universe but we can’t forget that it is the center of the solar system, which is made up of the sun, the moons, the planets, the comets, the meteors and the planetoids (or asteroids) that travel around it. Our beloved earth is just one of the sun’s planets. The sun is a star of fifth grandeur. It’s a medium-sized star, since there are stars that are hundreds of thousands of times as large. Even so it’s tremendously big.
HIS DEVILISH PLAN WAS PERFECTLY IDIOTICAL
Now, just a little reflection: if we can’t even look at the sun, which is a “little” star, who will be able to see the sun’s Creator? We actually have no idea of how small and insignificant we are! The sun is a million times bigger than the earth. Now we may think: Hitler wanted to be the king of the world. Wasn’t that perfectly idiotical? If he succeeded with his devilish plan he would be the sovereign of exactly one one millionth of the sun, that, in turn, is almost nothing when compared with the whole creation...
Let’s use our imagination: if there happened to be a hollow ball the size of the sun, it’d take at least a million earths to fill it. Hang it all ! If we could see the sun in the sky it’d look like a dinner plate. It doesn’t look as large as the building next door or even the letter-box at the corner of upper class districts.
ALBEIT TREMENDOUSLY HOT, IT’S NOT THE HOTTEST
Why does it look so small ? Obviously because it’s so far away from our sight. On the average it’s about one hundred and fifty million kilometers away. Strange as it may seem, the sun is not one of the hottest stars, albeit it is extremely hot. At its center, scientists believe that the temperature is about nine point five million degrees Centigrade, the scale we normally use on our ordinary thermometers. The temperature at the surface is about five thousand and two hundred degrees in the Celsius scale (the same as Centigrade). Those who study the sun can tell from the light that comes from it what its outer layers are made of. They can do it by using an instrument called SPECTROSCOPE. They have found in these outer layers a large number of substances which can be found here on the earth, namely iron, silver, aluminum, lead and copper.
THAT’S THAT FOR THE TIME BEING
There’s a difference, though. On the earth these materials are solids, as we know, whereas in the sun they are gases. That’s because the sun is far too hot for any material there to be solid. Makes sense, doesn’t it? By the way, it’s far too hot for any material to be liquid either, hence the fact that all the materials the sun is made of are gases. Sometimes people refer to the sun as A BALL OF FIRE but that is not a good description. So hot are the gases of the sun that they glow just as the white-hot filament in an electric lamp glows. Therefore they are not burning up as the gas in a gas stove burns. And as far as information on the sun is concerned, that’s that for the time being.
