Once upon a time, about 4.6 billion years ago, there was a massive interstellar cloud. The sun, the planets, moons, and all objects in our solar system formed out of this cloud. Today we call it the solar nebula.
How did scientists figure out the sun's age? They used a process called radioactive dating to determine the age of the oldest known meteorites. Since the meteorites formed at the same time as the sun, they must be the same age.
According to NASA, the sun is about 150 million kilometres away from Earth. That's pretty far. But not as far as Mars, which is 228 million km from the sun, and certainly not as far away as Neptune at 4.5 billion km!
Have you ever enjoyed the warm glow of sunlight on your face? That light took about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to you. But if you wanted to travel on a plane to the sun? That trip would take about 18 years. So, travelling on a sunbeam is faster than travelling on an airplane!
Voyager 1, a space probe that NASA launched in 1977, is now more then 23.3 billion km from the sun and counting. If you were travelling on Voyager 1 right now, you would barely be able to see the sun. It would appear as a very bright dot. Voyager 1 was designed to explore the far reaches of space. It is continuing to travel away from the sun, to the edge of the solar system and beyond!
In about five billion years, the hydrogen at the sun's core will burn up. It will expand, and then contract, and after a very long time it will become another cloud of dust. Eventually, that cloud of interstellar dust might one day become a new star, so you could say that it'll live happily ever after.
More starry wonders:
What are some other solar systems?
How are stars made?
Image source: NASA Image and Video Library
