You are at the beach where you hear the sound of the ocean, feel the sand slide against your feet, and your skin burning from the scorching hot Sun. The Seagulls peck on your food while you desperately search for some sun screen. You had no sun screen. You look up at the Sun and wonder about why does the Sun have to be this hot. Then you wonder, is the Sun yellow? Let's pop this balloon to find out!
What is the Sun?
The Sun is a huge ball of scorching plasma being held together by gravity. It is about 1.4 million kilometers across and roughly 150 million kilometers away from us. The mass of the Sun is big! It weighs 99.8% of everything in the solar system. At the surface the temperature is 5,500°C and in the core it is around 15 million degrees. The Sun is 4.6 billion years old having about 5 billion years left. The Sun is 73% hydrogen, 25% helium, and the rest 2% are a bunch of other elements such as carbon and iron.
Is the Sun yellow?
This myth is false! The sun is not yellow but white. Since the Sun emits all light across a visible spectrum equally, those wavelengths make white. If you did see the Sun in space with no atmosphere, it would be white. In our atmosphere it scatters short wavelengths, specifically blues and violets off in every single direction. This scattered wavelength is what makes our sky blue. So when we look at the Sun from Earth, we can see a yellow Sun, since some of the blue has skimmed off and is left with skews of yellow. This myth has a real cause! It isn’t that they are imagining yellow, but they are seeing the atmosphere not the sun.
Fun Facts
Our Sun isn't on fire. Fire needs oxygen and there's none in space. It runs on nuclear fusion, which is why it's lasted 4.6 billion years instead of a few thousand. The Sun is technically the largest single thing you will ever see with your own eyes. The Sun is slowly getting brighter. It was noticeably dimmer when life began on Earth.