The sun produces poem-worthy sunsets and as much energy as 1 trillion megaton bombs every second – wow, that’s raw untapped power.

The sun is a star, just like the other stars we see at night, and it’s big.

The sun would hold the earth a million times over and it’s been ‘burning’ for almost 5 billion years.

Hang on, we say the sun burns, but it doesn’t burn like wood burns. Instead, the sun is a gigantic nuclear reactor. The temperature at the surface of the sun is about 5,600 Celsius, in the centre a whopping 15 million degrees celsius. Feeling sweaty yet?

As you read this, the Sun is going through quite an active period and only last month we saw sunspots, cool areas on the sun, up to five times bigger than the earth. Solar flares were seen shooting away up to 100,000 kilometres in length. And, there’s more on the way.

Ever wondered what would happen if the sun suddenly disappeared? We’d have no idea it had gone for 8.5 minutes.

We’d still see it as an eerie sight, lingering, like a ghost in the sky. Just imagine, nobody on earth could predict what was about to happen.  And there’s no way of protecting yourself from it.

As soon as the last of the sun’s light reached us eight and a half minutes after the sun itself disappeared, the sun would blink out and night would fall over the entire earth. Not until that instant would earth sail off in a straight line into space. Sleep well tonight.

Dave Reneke from Australasian Science magazine