Our Sun

Earth and Sun
Image: The giant coronal mass ejection in the image blasted off the Sun in October 2003. The image was taken by the international SOHO spacecraft. Credit: NASA and European Space Agency.

The Sun gives us heat, light, our food, and the air that we breathe. It powers the atmosphere to give us the winds and rain. Even the coal and oil that generate electricity for light and power come from plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago and depended on the Sun for life. The Sun heats the land, oceans, and air. It evaporates water from lakes and oceans. When the water vapor cools, it drops as rain or snow, giving us the moisture we need for drinking water and for plants and animals to grow. Water, Air, Life, and Land - the Earth is a system.

For most of us, Earth's environment ends somewhere above the clouds but below the space shuttle. The 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) of space between the Earth we know and the star we see is empty black space, a vacuum. Or is it?

Geospace & Space Weather

To the unaided eye, space appears to be a vast, dark void, and the Sun a tranquil sphere of light. But in fact, space is not empty. That's because we live in the atmosphere of our dynamic Sun. With the advent of radios, RAM, and rockets in the 20th century, scientists found that Earth's environment stretches thousands of miles into space, and the Sun brings us far more than just daylight. We actually live inside the atmosphere of the Sun. From observatories in space and on the ground, physicists now study an invisible realm as changeable as the weather, windier than a mountain peak, and as electric as a city night. They call it geospace...Earth's space. Our solar system has the cosmic equivalent of winds, clouds, storms, and hurricanes -- scientists call it space weather. Just like weather on Earth, it can be both mild and wild.


Sun Earth viewer
Sun Earth Viewer
Watch real-time NASA satellite images of the Sun and Earth. Explore and compare solar and terrestrial data from a variety of NASA missions. Visit the Sun Earth Viewer
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Our Dynamic Sun
The rotating Sun seen in extreme ultraviolet light reveals active regions and a blast across its surface. Visit Our Dynamic Sun
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CME's Impact on the Sun
An overview of the basic elements of space weather: an explosion on the Sun causes massive ejections of particles. Also called "CoronaMass Ejections" (CME). CME explodes away from the Sun, travels across space, and impacts Earth's magnetosphere. Explosions on the Sun send that impact the Earth's magnetosphere. Find out more about CME's
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Swirling Auroras
Beautiful, swirling, and sweeping aurora, the only visible evidence of space weather. See more and learn about Auroras