Sun
Floating in Space
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22m
The 4.6-billion year old fiery colossus is a near-perfect sphere of plasma that could fit a million Earths. For once, it's safe to stare. Imaging technology enables us to see many aspects of the Sun. This video contains the latest technology giving the highest resolution images of the star's surface.
Up Next in Floating in Space
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Mercury
Visit Mercury, the smallest and innermost planet in the Solar System. Its orbit around the Sun takes 87.97 days, the shortest of all the planets in the Solar System. Named after the Roman deity Mercury, the messenger of the gods, Mercury has 'mercurial' temperature swings from extreme heat to ex...
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Venus
Visit the second planet from the Sun, and our celestial neighbor. Venus is a world of extremes, where scorching heat and a toxic atmosphere reign supreme. The planet spins so slowly that a Venusian day is longer than a Venusian year. Its surface, adorned with thousands of volcanic peaks, is an in...
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Earth
Home! Earth, the 3d planet from the Sun, formed 4.5 bya and weighs 6.58 billion trillion tons. Earth is not a perfect sphere, but an oblate spheroid, “squashed” a little at the North and South poles. The equatorial diameter is about 7,926 miles, but the polar diameter is 7,899.86 miles. Earth’s s...
