Film Night October – The Planets – 25 Years Later : Star

 

The sun is literally the centre of the Solar System – indeed, it takes its name from the Roman personification of the Sun as deity, in Latin.

For most of humanity’s time on the Earth, the sun has often been seen as the epitome of perfection of form, and agreed upon as the source of all light, warmth and energy – which it is.

But how does the sun relate to the Planets ? Starting with Galileo Galilei, we learned that the sun is not perfect – there are sunspots. 

Father Giovanni Secchi at the Vatican observatory proved spectroscopically that the Sun is a star. 

With time, we have come to know that the planets formed together with the sun – and the observed development of the planetary systems of other stars has confirmed this more and more as time goes by.

The influence of the sun is very great – even at the poles in complete darkness, the Solar Wind paints Aurorae on the skies above. Eugene Parker computed that there would be a supersonic solar wind – and exploration of

Mercury in the space age proved him to have been conservative – the sun is even more violent. The Skylab mission, and Voyager 2 have both expanded our conception of the limits of the Sun and

the Solar System in turn.

 

Since 1999, the Sun continues to fuel science and exploration :

• Orbiting Observatories of the Sun – SOHO, Ulysses – and the mapping of the Corona, as well as the and discovery of new comets.
• The Parker solar probe – in flight since 2018, doing Coronal dives
• The Solar Space Fleet – STEREO, Parker, PUNCH, Hinode
• Aurorae of the Gas Giants
• Imaging the stars – The spots of Betelguese and other stars
• Exoplanets and their aurorae visible from light years away
• The Star Upon the Earth – controlled fusion reactors of the future.