AST 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Tunxis Community College, Milky Way, Limb Darkening
18 Dec 2020
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Document Summary
The sun is a g2 star that is in the main sequence phase of its life. The sun"s surface temperature is about 5800 kelvin. The sun is 4. 6 billion years old. In roughly 5 billion years the sun will become a red giant star; at that time it will vaporize the earth before shrinking to become a white dwarf star. The average angular diameter of the sun is about . 5 degree, or about that of the moon. The average distance of the sun from the earth is 150 million kilometers, or about 300,000 times closer than any other star. The diameter of the sun is 1. 39 x 10^6 km, or about 109 times the diameter of earth or about 10 times the diameter of jupiter. The mass of the sun is 330,000 times the earth. The sun could hold over 1,300,000 earths. The sun is larger than 95% of the stars in our portion of the milky way galaxy.
