The latest 39.62 mm, 1 oz .999 fine silver domed proof $5 in the Royal Australian Mint’s “Earth & Beyond Series” celebrates our sun. Mintage is 5,000.
The sun is the G-type main-sequence star at the center of our solar system. It measures about 864,000 miles across with a mass some 330,000 times that of Earth. In fact, it accounts for some 99.86% of the total mass of the solar system.
It consists largely of hydrogen (73%) and helium (25%) with small amounts of oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.
For most of its life, the sun has been busy fusing that hydrogen into helium. It does so at a rate of about 600 million tons a second, and it has been doing this for four billion years. It should continue for at least another five billion years.
That fusion process produces enormous amounts of energy. A small fraction escapes to fall on Earth as sunlight. This is the energy essential for all life on Earth. As the primary driver of our weather and climate, the sun is a subject worth celebrating.
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