Sun Color Solar System

The color of the sun reveals a range of information about our star including the stages of its life and how it interacts with the atmosphere of Earth. The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light and infrared radiation with 10% at ultraviolet energies.

Learn what color the Sun is and why it appears different colors from Space, the Earth, and in photographs. Our Sun: Facts Our Sun is a 4.5 billion-year-old yellow dwarf star - a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium - at the center of our solar system. It's about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth and it's our solar system's only star.

Without the Sun's energy, life as we know it could not exist on our home planet. If you have ever used a solar filter or eclipse glasses you would have seen the Sun looking orange or perhaps some other colour. This is just the filter colour, not the Sun's real colour.

Likewise, coloured photos of the Sun from NASA and other space agencies are coloured with filters and other processing. The Sun is a G-type main sequence star that contains roughly 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system, and with an absolute magnitude of +4.83, it outshines at least 85% of all other stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The Sun is a yellow dwarf star at the center of our solar system.

Earth and all other objects in our solar system orbit around the Sun due to gravity - the Sun contains over 98% of all mass in the solar system and so exerts a strong gravitational pull. Like other stars, the Sun is a dense ball of gas that creates energy through nuclear fusion reactions in the core, creating helium atoms from. The Sun is a different colour depending on how you observe it.

These three images are, from left, NASA's NuSTAR seeing high-energy X-rays; the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hinode mission seeing lower energy X-rays; and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory seeing ultraviolet light. "The color components of sunlight are so close enough to being present in equal amounts that it is much more correct to say that the sun is white than to say it is yellow, orange, or any other. NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery.

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