Science Snippets
Oh, Wow!
By Fred Baer
August 2007

I had an oh, wow astronomy moment. I was able to put an astronomy fact into human terms. That’s not easy to do, at least not for me. When you talk astronomy, you are usually talking very big numbers. Distances between stars. Weights (masses, actually) of planets. The amount of power that stars put out.

What I had been thinking about was the amount of power the Sun puts out.

One way to put that number into somewhat human terms is to state how many 100 watt light bulbs that much power could light.
Numbers with lots of frivolous zeros between the decimal point and the more serious digits. If those numbers could sing, they would probably steal from Porgy and Bess and sing I’ve Got Plenty of Nothings. These numbers are just too huge to for me to wrap my mind around.

What I had been thinking about was the amount of power the Sun puts out. One way to put that number into somewhat human terms is to state how many 100 watt light bulbs that much power could light. No good. The number left my mind numb.1 Then, there is the number of tons of hydrogen the Sun converts to helium each second.2 Interesting and amazing, but not something that gave me a feel for the power produced. But then the oh, wow moment struck.

For you to understand what hit me, I have to bother you with a slightly large number, the number of miles between Earth and the Sun. That’s roughly 93 million miles. I won’t say that 93 million is a small number, but it is tiny compared to cosmic distances. It’s small even compared to the distance from Earth to the next closest star.3 In human terms, however, 93 million miles is pretty big.

How big is it? The fastest most of us will ever travel is the roughly 600 miles per hour of commercial passenger jets. How long would it take to cover 93 million miles traveling at a constant 600 miles per hour? Would you believe more than 17 and half years? So what was my oh,wow moment, my epiphany, my sudden insight? It was that from 93 million miles away, the sun gives us light, gives us heat, gives us life. From 93 million miles away. Oh, wow!


1 If you had 4x1024 (that’s a 4 followed by 24 zeros) 100 watt bulbs burning, they would use about the same amount of power as the sun puts out. A 4 followed by 24 zeros is 4 million billion billion.

2 According to The Universe and Beyond, Third Edition, by Terence Dickinson, each second, the Sun converts 655 million tons of hydrogen to 650 million tons of helium. The five ton difference is converted into energy, the energy that makes the Sun shine.

3 For those of you who never paid much attention to astronomy, our nearest star is the Sun. The only reason that the sun looks different than the little pin points of light we can see at night is that the Sun is much, much closer to us. The distance to the second closest star to us is more than 200,000 times the distance to the Sun.


Copyright © 2007 Fred Baer.


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