The information for the following story is from the following Internet site accessed 04/08/2003:
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/sol.html

The Sun

Without the sun's heat and light, no life could exist on our planet.

The sun is a star like the countless others that you see in our night sky. It is not the biggest of the billions of stars in our galaxy, but it is the star that is closest to the earth. For that reason, it appears much larger than the other stars.

The sun is an enormous ball of blazing gases, mostly hydrogen and helium. The sun, like Earth and the other planets, rotates on an axis. Because the sun is made of gases rather than of solid matters like earth, it has a "strange" rotation behavior. Its rotation is faster at the sun's equator than at the poles. It rotates once every 25.4 days at the equator while it can take 36 days at the poles.

Light and heat are given off by the sun's surface - the photosphere. Temperatures reach about 5800 Kelvin (K). Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius which is 373 K. That is extremely hot! But it has "cool" spots where the temperature is only 3800k. These spots on the surface of the sun are called sunspots. They are often seen as dark spots and can be as large as 50,000 km (30, 000 miles) in width. The sunspots are not really dark but they appear to be because of the sun's brightness surrounding them. What causes these spots is a complicated matter and not fully understood, but it is believed that it has to do with the sun's magnetic field.