How our sun was formed

Where did the sun come from?

Click here to purchase the full issue. Some 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun was born from a cloud of interstellar gas and dust. It came from a giant molecular cloud — a collection of gas up to 600 light-years in diameter with the mass of 10 million Suns — which had been circling the Milky Way for who knows how many years.

How did the Sun become a planet?

The spin caused the cloud to flatten into a disk like a pancake. In the center, the material clumped together to form a protostar that would eventually become the sun. "There is a rotationally supported disk around this protostar," astronomer John Tobin told Space.com about a similar early sun, adding it's a "key element" in building planets.

What was the original chemical composition of the Sun?

The Sun's original chemical composition was inherited from the interstellar medium out of which it formed. Originally it would have been about 71.1% hydrogen, 27.4% helium, and 1.5% heavier elements. [ 53 ]

What is the Sun made up of?

The Sun is made up of plasma, a gas-like state of matter that conducts electricity. This plasma behaves differently in different layers of the star. There’s the core, where fusion takes place.

Why is the Sun called the Sun?

The Sun has been called by many names. The Latin word for Sun is “sol,” which is the main adjective for all things Sun-related: solar. Helios, the Sun god in ancient Greek mythology, lends his name to many Sun-related terms as well, such as heliosphere and helioseismology.

Did the Sun have a mother?

The sun and its planets had, for lack of a less anthropomorphic word, a mother: a giant star whose short life provided the embryonic material for the solar system. This precursor material might have been isolated from the rest of the galaxy for at least 30 million years, a lengthy gestation that belies the speed at which the sun made planets.