Stars are balls of gas. The sun is a star. Gas is pulled into the center of the sun by gravity. The gas gets packed really tight making the gas very hot. The gas is so hot it goes through nuclear reactions.
The sun makes up almost all of our solar system's mass. The more mass an object has the more gravity it has. (Parents: This can be a difficult concept to grasp for adults, let alone children. It is okay if they do not fully understand now, but try to point out the sun is responsible for most of the mass of our solar system--99.8%. This concept plays heavily into the higher concepts of the universes workings.)
All of the planets are in orbit around the sun.
The sun spins around, but because it is made up of gases the middle spins faster than the poles (or the top and bottom). The sun is on an 11 year cycle which can be monitored by the sun's freckles.
The sun has freckles! Okay, maybe they are not really freckles; those dark spots on the sun are called—Sunspots!
Sunspots are areas of the sun which are cooler than the other regions.
The sun is very important to us; it provides heat, and light. Plants could not grow with out the sun. Your body also needs the sun to produce vitamins. Without the sun we would not be able to live.
Long ago before people understood the sun, many believed it represented a powerful
figure beyond their understanding—those cultures believed the sun was
a god.
For example, the Greeks thought the sun was the chariot of Helios, who would
ride through the sky everyday. The stories were an attempt to understand and
explain things they did not understand.
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