Near and far away..

For today's tiny Tuesday mystery I present the setting sun. At ~150 000 000 km away it appears very small to us on earth. For most our history it has been a mystery and even the late Lord Kelvin couldn't explain to Darwin how any chemical reaction could have burnt long enough for evolution to have happened.

We now know that it's nuclear fusion not a chemical reaction and the sun is about 330 000 more massive than the earth and it's mostly made up of hydrogen which it is fusing to helium, (600 billion kg per second) which has been doing for about 4.6 billion years and will continue to do for about another 4 billion years, when it will run out of steam and after a sudden size gain fizzle out as a white dwarf...

By galactic standard our nearest start is a tiddler, Betelgeuse in Orion which is between 10 and 20 times heavier than our sun - but then big stars burn much faster it is only millions of years old and will go pop soon (in cosmological time).

However both are miniscule compared with Sagittarius A* the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy which is estimated to be 4 million times heavier than our sun...

I thus claim that the sun is tiny...

As I said for most of our history the sun has been a magical force and part of the gods, I go on to claim that it's also a mystery...


Today's blip is also apparently my 4000th. Since my last milestone, our house rebuild has completed - over budget and late but done. I've worked like a moron for one client more than any other. Looked at lots of other people's great blips, and posted the odd passable one myself.

Onwards and upward...