--- title: The Sun, our star — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The Sun, our star», a lesson of the space course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: The Sun is a star, the same kind of thing as the tiny dots you see at night, only so close that it fills our day with light. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Space](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/) / The Sun, our star # The Sun, our star Lesson 1 of the space course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/space/1-the-sun-our-star/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/0/) — The Sun is a star, the same kind of thing as the tiny dots you see at night, only so close that it fills our day with light. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/1/) — It is a gigantic ball of hot gas: if the Sun were a football, the Earth would be a peppercorn about 25 metres away. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/2/) — The Sun does not burn like a bonfire, there is no oxygen fire at all; deep in its core hydrogen is squeezed into helium, and that nuclear fusion gives out the light and heat. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/3/) — Light is fast but the Sun is far, so when you watch a sunset you see the Sun as it was about 8 minutes earlier. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/4/) — The Sun is not calm: it has dark sunspots, flares and a wind of particles that, when it hits the Earth's magnetic field, lights up the northern lights. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/6/) — The Sun is a star, an ordinary yellow dwarf, and it holds about 99.8 percent of all the mass in the Solar System. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/7/) — About 109 Earths would fit side by side across the Sun, and about 1.3 million Earths would fit inside it. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/8/) — The Earth is about 150 million kilometres from the Sun, and sunlight takes about 8 minutes 20 seconds to reach us. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/9/) — In the Sun's core, hydrogen nuclei are squeezed together to make helium, and this nuclear fusion releases the energy that makes the Sun shine. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/10/) — The Sun is not a fire: nothing burns with oxygen there. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/11/) — The Sun's visible surface, the photosphere, is about 5,500 degrees Celsius, but its thin outer atmosphere, the corona, is over a million degrees; exactly why the corona is so hot is still being studied. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/12/) — Sunspots are darker, cooler patches where strong magnetic fields stop hot gas rising; they look black only because the rest of the Sun is brighter, and many are bigger than the Earth. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/14/) — The Sun constantly blows out charged particles called the solar wind, which flows past all the planets at hundreds of kilometres per second. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/15/) — The Earth's magnetic field shields us from most of the solar wind, and particles leaking in near the poles make the aurora, the northern and southern lights; near solar maximum, as in 2024, aurorae were seen much further from the poles than usual, even in England. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/17/) — The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, roughly halfway through its life; in about 5 billion years it will swell into a red giant and end as a white dwarf. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/1-the-sun-our-star/18/) — The Sun is a ball of gas, so different parts spin at different speeds: about 25 days at its equator and about 35 days near its poles; astronomers first noticed the Sun spins by watching sunspots move across its face. - next →: [How the Solar System was born](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/2-how-the-solar-system-was-born/) - ↑ back to [Space](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/)