STARGAZER #497 for Jan. 24, 2009


That Lucky Old Sun

In a 1949 #1 hit song, Frankie Laine crooned "that lucky old sun has nothin'
to do but roll around heaven all day." I like the song, but with all due
respects to Frankie, it just ain't so.

In fact, the Sun is an incredible workhorse that's on duty 24 hours a day,
365 days a year, doing the job it's been doing for 5 billion years and will
continue doing another 5 billion, give or take a few hundred million years. And
we can thank our lucky stars that it is for without the Sun we wouldn't be.
Should the Sun suddenly go out--which it won't any time soon--we would go out
with it, and very quickly.

It's easy to take the Sun for granted, and during hot summer days we might
even find ourselves having bad thoughts about it. Yet all we have to do is
imagine a frozen, dark Earth, and we promptly become Sun-appreciators. But
providing warmth and light to see by is just part of the Sun's job.


Animal life depends upon plant life for survival. Chlorophyll-containing
green plants--which include virtually all the plants we eat--require light for
photosynthesis, the process by which they live and grow--and that light
directly or indirectly comes from the Sun. Photosynthesis also converts the
carbon
dioxide we breath out into the oxygen we need to breathe in. So, no Sun, no
plants. And no plants, no plant-eating, oxygen-breathing animals--like us.




(NASA photo)


The Sun is also the mother of all energy generators. According to Wikipedia,
the amount of solar energy reaching Earth in an hour is more energy than the
world uses in a year. And the solar energy reaching Earth in a year is twice
the total amount of energy we could ever obtain from all of Earth's
non-renewable resources--coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium--combined.

So it turns out that our "lucky" old Sun really has a lot more to do than
just roll around heaven. But as essential as it is, it also has its darker
side, so to speak.

The radiation that provides all the life-giving benefits also has
destructive powers. Sun burns, skin cancers, cataracts, and heat strokes are
but some
of the ways the Sun is harmful to us. And that same radiation--mostly
ultraviolet--that damages us also breaks down and destroys many products we
rely on
daily, like paint, rubber, plastic, and roofing.

And if that's not enough, our star of life and energy will eventually become
a death star of destruction. In the last stages of its life, the Sun will
expand, becoming so huge that Mercury, Venus, and Earth will be vaporized and
consumed. All Earth-bound life that still exists in 5 billion years will be
extinguished by the very star that made life possible.

So that hardworking "lucky" old Sun is a mixed bag, deserving both our
gratitude and our wary respect.

Next Two Weeks. Avg. sunrise: 7:22 a.m.; avg. sunset: 6:02 p.m. (exact for
Waco, TX)
* Monday's new Moon produces an annular solar eclipse not visible from our
hemisphere.
* Friday evening a crescent Moon is above Venus.
* Feb. 2 is Groundhog Day and Candlemas, a cross-quarter day celebrating the
middle of winter, and the Moon is at 1st quarter.

Naked-eye Planets. [The Sun, Moon, and planets rise in the east and set in
the west because of Earth's west-to-east rotation on its axis.] Evening:
Brilliant "evening star" Venus is now at its highest in the southwest at dark,
and Saturn is up by 9 p.m. Morning: Saturn is high in the west, and by early
February Mercury begins appearing very low in the east southeast at dawn.


=======================================================

Stargazer appears every other week in the Waco Tribune-Herald and other
newspapers. Paul Derrick is an amateur astronomer who lives in Waco. Write him
at 918 N. 30th St., Waco, TX 76707, call or fax at (254) 753-6920, or e-mail
at paulderrickwaco@....

Copyright 2009 by Paul Derrick. Permission is granted for free electronic
distribution as long as these paragraphs are included. Please obtain
permission from the author for publication in any other form. To be added to
(or
removed from) the free e-mail distribution list, send your e-mail address (and
name) to _paulderrickwaco@..._ (mailto:paulderrickwaco@...) .


* * See the Stargazer Web site at http://www.stargazerpaul.com. * *



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