☉ Sun

Called Sol by the Romans and Helios by the Greeks

Light The day The sky

Which sign is the Sun in now?

Detail of Total Eclipse of the Sun by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
Total Eclipse of the Sun Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, 1878 New York Public Library The total solar eclipse he watched on July 29, 1878, at Creston, Wyoming Territory: the Moon covers the Sun, and the corona shines around it. Plate III of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Our star, which the Romans called Sol and the Greeks Helios, the god who drove the Sun’s chariot across the sky.

In myth

In the Homeric Hymn to Helios, the Sun is a god: the son of Hyperion and Euryphaessa, “the far-shining one,” and the brother of Eos, the Dawn, and Selene, the Moon. Wearing a golden helmet, his bright hair streaming, he drives his chariot and stallions to the top of heaven and down again to Ocean, shining on men and gods alike and gazing with piercing eyes. Rome had a sun god of its own, Sol Indiges, with a shrine on the Quirinal Hill, a yearly sacrifice on August 9 and another shrine, shared with Luna, the Moon, in the Circus Maximus; the Roman poets equated him with Helios.

Goddesses of the Sun

In the Goddess Encyclopedia, these goddesses count the Sun among their realms:

Sekhmet Amaterasu

How the star got its name

NASA notes that the Latin word for the Sun, sol, gives us the adjective “solar,” and that the Greek sun god Helios gives words like “heliosphere” and “helioseismology.”

Symbols

Chariot and stallions Golden helmet Streaming bright hair

The star

A yellow dwarf star, 4.5 billion years old, that holds 99.8% of the solar system’s mass. It is a huge ball of hydrogen and helium. In its core, where temperatures top 15 million °C, hydrogen is fused into helium, and those nuclear reactions power its heat and light; its visible surface, the photosphere, is about 5,500 °C.

Diameter
1,391,400 km 109 × Earth
Mass
1,988,400 × 10²⁴ kg 332,900 × Earth
Gravity at the surface
274 m/s² 28 × Earth's
Spins once in
25.4 Earth days at 16° latitude; it varies with latitude
Distance from Earth
149.6 million km 1 AU, on average
Surface temperature
about 5,500 °C the photosphere, its visible surface
Core temperature
about 15 million °C where hydrogen fuses into helium
Made of
Hydrogen 91%, helium 8.9% in the photosphere
Age
4.5 billion years

Figures from NASA’s Sun Fact Sheet; the age and the temperatures in degrees Celsius are from NASA’s Sun facts page. Comparisons with Earth are from the fact sheet.

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