A close up shot of a sunspot.

SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, is a project of international collaboration (wow)between ESA and NASA to study the Sun. It was launched on December 2, 1995. The SOHO spacecraft was built in Europe. NASA was responsible for the launch.

Dispense with Islam, its apologists, China, Left and Right, 'Doomed!!' Europe and America 'Alone!!' ..oh and of course the issue du jour Jade for a minute - and consider how small we all are in the grand scheme of things instead.

The Sun is the centre of our Solar System. The diameter of the Solar System is approximately 11,400,000km. The Sun is one of more than 100 billion in our galaxy.

It has a mass of about 2x10^30 kg.

Its diameter is 1,390,00 km.

The Sun contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System

About 74% of the Sun's mass is hydrogen, with 25% helium and the rest made up of trace quantities of heavier elements.

The rotation rate of the Sun is 25.4 days at the equator, 36 days at the poles.

The Sun is personified in many mythologies: the Greeks called it Helios and the Romans called it Sol.

The distance from the Earth to the Sun is 149,570,000 km.

Sunspot activity isn't constant. There was a period of very low sunspot activity in the latter half of the 17th century called the Maunder Minimum. It coincides with an abnormally cold period in northern Europe sometimes known as the Little Ice Age.

The Sun is a second-generation star, perhaps formed from the remains of a previous supernova as there's a high abundance of heavy elements such as iron, gold, and even uranium in the Solar System. The most plausible ways that these elements could be produced are by endothermic nuclear reactions during a supernova.

Direct viewing of the Sun with the naked eye delivers about 4 milliwatts of sunlight to the retina, heating it up and potentially damaging it.

The Sun emits a low density stream of charged particles known as the solar wind which travels throughout the solar system at about 450 km/sec. The solar wind and the much higher energy particles ejected by solar flares can have dramatic effects on the Earth ranging from radio interference to the beautiful Aurora Borealis.

Akhenaten, the 'heretic' pharoah, changed almost 2,000 years of Ancient Egyptian polytheistic religion when he banned the worship of any God or Goddess other than the Sun disc Aten. He, his wife Nefertiti and his daughters were depicted worshipping and making offers to the Aten.

The temperature of the Sun varies from 5800K on the surface to 15,600,000K at the core. The outermost layer of the Sun, the corona, is between 1-2,000,000K. Though its temperature is high, its particle density is so low that it releases little heat. If a person were able to stand in the Sun's corona they wouldn't burn, instead they'd freeze in the near vacuum.

The Sun when it dies will collapse into a 'white dwarf' (that's racist and mean) and take around one million million years to cool off (to coincide with a diminution of a certain sense of grievance/reaction to the 'racism' in Big Brother, presumably)