The picture above is of the solar system today. The sun is in the middle of its lifespan, and is currently in the main sequence.

Age: 4.55 billion years
Mass: 1.99x10^33g
Radius: 700,000 km
Luminosity: 3.83x10^26 Watts
Temperature: 5779 K
Fuel Supply: ~50% of the core hydrogen has been consumed.


Sources

The text has been adapted for a 9th grade level. This was originally the hypertext version of a public lecture given on 1997 June 12 at the Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, as part of the 1997 New Vistas inAstronomy lecture series. It has been updated a number of times since then.The Once and Future Sun by Richard W. Pogge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at The Ohio State University Department of Astronomy (www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu)