Talk:Sun
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I would understand if you had a list that said, "Bodies in the solar system:" but instead the title is "see also:" Why does it say:
See also:
- Sun
If we do this, then we might as well put this on every article:
See also:
- This article
I think putting a different title than "see also:" is the better way to go.
- True, that; the standard approach for the others seems to be putting this under the external links section:
Solar system:
Sun - Mercury - Venus - Earth - Mars - Asteroids - Jupiter - Saturn - Uranus - Neptune - Pluto - Comets
- with the divider included, so I'll try it that way. -- John Owens 22:06 Apr 4, 2003 (UTC)
- Hmm, it would work better without the section at the bottom about other uses of Sun, but it might do. -- John Owens
- I agree, the other uses of Sun are annoying. In fact I find all "other uses of article" to be annoying in articles I read. oh well.
- Hmm, it would work better without the section at the bottom about other uses of Sun, but it might do. -- John Owens
oh $hit, sorry, I didn't realize that all solar system objects had the same thing at the bottom including the "self-link". sorry about that, revert if you like, then go from there. A self-link actually wouldn't be bad. It was the ugly bolded Sun part that looked kind of annoying.
- No, they don't include a self-link, I cut & pasted from Mercury for that so I figured it'd look silly if Mercury was bolded in the example. But I didn't change Sun like it would be in keeping with the others, that's why it wasn't bold in the example above. -- John Owens
I just saw what you did, it looks better than what was there before. I think because the See also: was on the same link as the Sun before, so it looked a bit messy. But now there is a space, as well as the divider. cool.
Poor Yoric, I don't think it's a good idea to load up the table with all those random factoids. Wikipedia:WikiProject Astronomical Objects has a template for data about stars, and the more stuff the Sun's table gets cluttered up with the more it diverges from that. I'd suggest trying to work them into the body of the article's text instead. Bryan
What does "Atoms undergoing chemical reaction to generate Luminosity" actually mean, anyway? There are no chemical reactions in the Sun, it is composed of plasma. Bryan
Quote from the article:
"This releases energy which escapes from the surface of the Sun as light."
This statement is very misleading as it seems to suggest that energy ONLY escapes from the Sun as light, whereas energy is actually emitted from the Sun across most of the electromagnetic spectrum.
- It is also to a much smaller extent released as the kinetic and thermal energy of solar wind plasma. I'll try rewriting the line. Bryan 03:16, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Is there a reason that the Sun's vital statistics give its diameter but those of the planets give their radius? Marnanel 06:53, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)
Can we put something on the sun's place within the galaxy and upwards in it? i.e. the sun itself rotates around the centre of a galaxy known as the milky way with a centre...(talk)--BozMo 20:27, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
- I have copied over a little bit of info from Solar system to address this, but I'd like to see more information about how the Sun formed. Eric Forste 01:01, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- That sounds like a song, and I do believe there is a similar song. Let's see... Sun Song (http://www.astrocappella.com/sun.shtml) is not it. It's not in The Astronomer's Song Book (http://www.ircc.cc.fl.us/atircc/commout/planetarium/astsongbook.pdf). Maybe I'm thinking of Monty Python's The Galaxy (http://www.astro.washington.edu/kevin/galaxy.html) SEWilco 03:56, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
Quote from the article: "3.9 × 10^45 atoms undergo nuclear reactions there every second" If this were true, the energy output per nuclear reaction would be somewhat less than 1 eV. If we calculate the number of fused hydrogen atoms from the solar power ouput we get about 3.8 × 10^38. Sure, it's less per atom involved in a single reaction (hydrogen first fuses so deuterium and then some more reactions occur), but the energy output of a single reaction is certainly much higher than 1 eV. I'll rewrite that sentence. 193.171.121.30 14:51, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- The Chart of the Nuclides allows one to compute the mass defect as 4*1.00782504-4.0026033=0.0286969 amu (~0.72%), which translates into 4.28277 pJ or 26.7310 MeV. If the solar luminosity is 382.7 YW, then this means we have 8.936E+37 helions per second being produced. The number of individual reactions is triple that for the p-p chain, quadruple for the CNO chain.
- Urhixidur 23:38, 2004 Sep 6 (UTC)
time left for the sun
can someone add info about estimates on how much longer the sun will exist before it dies? thanks! Kingturtle 03:49, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Ahem!!! I was just wondering this. You want a thing done right you gotta do it yrself, holmes =) Yeago 22:44, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Shouldn't the main photographical illustration be a visible-light image of the Sun, rather than an X-ray one? A nice one showing some sunspots and chromosphere will be much better than an X-ray image that looks nothing like one might see in a telescope.
H-Bombs and Sustainable Energy?
Just how relevant is "Physicists are able to replicate thermonuclear reactions with hydrogen bombs. Sustained nuclear fusion on Earth for electricity generation may be possible in the future, with nuclear fusion reactors."? I hesitate to delete it, because having more information is usually better than having less, but I thought I'd point out how strikingly awkward that inclusion is.
solar rotation
With regard to the Sun page, I was using Allen's Astrophysical quantities for the solar rotation, and the recommended value was 25.38 days. Looking at the rotation periods determined by a whole list of methods, that value had a standard deviation of about 0.6 days. (See solar rotation) Do we want to carry it out to seven decimal places? Also I saw the edit
" This makes it possible for the Sun to rotate faster at its equator
(about 24 days) than it does at higher latitudes (28 days near its poles)."
Don't you mean about 25 days? I just want to make sure I know what you did there before I go and re-edit. Paul Reiser 04:27, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- The 24 day figure came from http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/Sun.html; go ahead and double-check as this could be a typo. The IAU/IAG paper specifies the rotations for the gas giants as being magnetospheric, but doesn't say so for the Sun; it could very well be this is just an "average" equatorial surface feature period. I had been using too many digits (the IAU/IAG paper gave nine significant digits to all rotation rates, but buried in the text is a mention that added zeroes are not actually significant), so I trimmed it back to the IAU value of 14.1844 degrees per day, which works out to 25.3800 days (these two zeroes are significant, this time).
- Urhixidur 04:46, 2005 Jan 4 (UTC)
I'm still suspicious of so many digits, given that all those different methods give such varying results, but so be it. I'm sure, however, that the scienceworld quote is wrong. The relationship between solar synodic and sidereal periods is
- <math>D'=\frac{YD}{Y-D}<math>
where D' is synodic period, D is sidereal period, and Y is orbital period of the earth (1 year). Using D=25.38 days, Y=365.25 days, I get D'=27.275267... days. Scienceworld and Allen quote 27.2753, and the old quote from the sun page was equivalent to 27.275 days, so everything fits. I will change the 24 to 25. Paul Reiser 11:49, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Thanks for clearing that up. You are rightly suspicious of the extra two digits in the IAU rotation period; I'm pretty sure this only an agreed-upon rotation value used to define the heliographic coordinate system. The Sun's true equatorial rotation period is probably somewhat different and probably varies over time (it certainly varies from point to point, if only because of the motion of the plasma).
- Urhixidur 17:36, 2005 Jan 4 (UTC)
Solar fusion
We've been trying to work out solar fusion numbers over at Nuclear fusion and Talk:Nuclear fusion - see the "Check these numbers?" section. I'm hoping that some of you folks know more about the solar fusion process than what we were able to piece together and can double-check what we (I) came up with. Thanks. SMesser 21:26, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Better picture?
All we have here are two SOHO pictures using the same special color filter. Can we not use a "normal light" picture on the top, possibly with a couple of sun spots? Awolf002 15:51, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- The problem is, our main source of PD solar system images is NASA/JPL, and they don't seem to have any boring yellow-light images of the Sun. -- Curps 20:03, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- OK, I found one. -- Curps 20:27, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Great! I was combing through NASA images, too. You were more sucessful than me. Thanks! Awolf002 03:16, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Symbol
I'd like to see the symbol for the Sun in the article. --FlockofPidgeons 24:06, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
German article of the Sun
The german article of the Sun is superb. I dont know if any of you guys knows German well enough to reuse some of the material but some of the stuff they talk in detail there is not ever mentioned in this article. Regards! --Smartech 20:44, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I put it into Babelfish, played around with it a little, then put it on a page Sonne translation. Its not a good translation, but its readable. We can edit it, etc. and get an idea of what it is saying. Paul Reiser 00:54, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- I've moved this to a subpage of this talk page, Talk:Sun/German translation - it wasn't appropriate for it to be in the main namespace. --TempLogInforPageMove 16:28, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- Just skimming over the babelfish translation, the main topics that the German article has that we don't are these, hopefully this list will provide some doable goals to work towards.
- More about the magnetic field
- Physical occilations
- History of the study of the sun
- visible features?
- history of culture related to the sun
- the development of the sun
- lots of references
- Rmrfstar 04:02, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Matter - Energy Conversion
4.26 million tonnes per second??? Drop the million and you have the correct figure. This can be checked by the famous E = Mc^2
- Indeed it can be checked, and if you do that carefully you'll find it really is 4.26 million tonnes per second, giving the solar luminosity of 3.8×1026W. Worldtraveller 02:56, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
The Sun and eye damage
I removed the recently-contributed RED BOX!!!!! on eye damage and added a brief section on it, since this is such a persistent meme. Solar eye damage is a much-overblown hazard: it rarely (if ever) happens to the unaided eye, and there are reports of people staring at the Sun for literally hours with no lasting ill effects. Of course, it is possible to go blind by looking at the Sun through binoculars, but it's also possible to go blind by ramming a fork into the eyes, and there's no BIG RED BOX!!!!! on that page. Sorry for the sarcasm -- I just deal with this sort of thing a lot in Real Life, being a solar physicist. zowie 21:48, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
- Thanks for pointing out the oversight! I'll go add a BIG RED BOX!!! to the fork article right now, no need to trouble yourself. :) Bryan 02:10, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
- Due to the complication of driving a ton of metal, I took care of "Fork in the road".
(SEWilco 02:54, 7 May 2005 (UTC))
- Can anyone add information on the effects of viewing the sun at sunset or sunrise? I remember once watching an annular eclipse at sunrise and wondering if I should be staring at it or not. I guess I ended up doing that despite the various "IF YOU LOOK AT THE SUN AT ALL YOU WILL GO BLIND AND ALSO PERHAPS DIE" warnings.
See Also
There is a big list at the bottom of the article, "See Also". Isn't this what categories are for? Should there be a Sun category? Ebeisher 16:37, 26 May 2005 (UTC)