Five Awesome Things About The Sun

It's important to take a look at our universe and seriously consider what we can learn from the information we received in the form of video and photo evidence from satellites and telescopes. But what's more important is HOLY COW THERE ARE FLAMES AS HUGE AS WHOLE COUNTRIES ON THESE PICTURES OF STARS..

This explosion is as big as the planet we live on. Easily.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA / Via nasa.gov

These are called coronal loops.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA / Via nasa.gov

They are made of superheated helium so hot it's just a bunch of protons and electrons jamming around up there in big loops like cotton candy made of fire, called plasma, as in "video game plasma rifle," not as in "can we please come to your office and take a bunch of your plasma for kids with leukemia."

The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula look like God's fingers.

Wikimedia Commons / Via upload.wikimedia.org

The Pillars of Creation are huge columns of interstellar gas left behind after star formation at the beginning of time. Here's the crazy thing: they've been destroyed. They were destroyed thousands of years before this picture was taken, by a supernova. But the speed of light is too slow for us to see it yet. Maybe in another thousand years.

They Might Be Giants have a number of true things to say about the sun.

youtube.com / Via YouTube

Science music men They Might Be Giants are very smart about a number of things, but this is a song in which they fire off even more factoids than usual, among them: "Yo ho it's hot/ the sun is not/ a place where we could live."

But they also say one untrue thing: "It is is so hot that everything on it is a gas." As we discussed above, much of the matter on the sun in the corona is plasma.

Nerd king Neil DeGrasse Tyson knows how to prolong the life of the sun

StarTalk's YouTube channel / Via youtube.com

I mean, yes, he assumes that we're going to life longer than any other species and develop "a way to channel helium from the outer layers deep down into the center," which would give us another hundred billion years to find a home on a planet orbiting a neighboring star. Knowing us, we'd put that off until the last minute, too.