The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy mainly as visible light and infrared radiation. It is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. Its diameter is about 1.39 million kilometres (864,000 miles), or 109 times that of Earth. Its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, and accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. Roughly three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen (~73%); the rest is mostly helium (~25%), with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.
Structure: The Sun has six regions: the core, the radiative zone, and the convective zone in the interior; the visible surface, called the photosphere; the chromosphere; and the outermost region, the corona. At the core, the temperature is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius), which is sufficient to sustain thermonuclear fusion. This is a process in which atoms combine to form larger atoms and in the process release staggering amounts of energy. Specifically, in the Sun’s core, hydrogen atoms fuse to make helium. The energy produced in the core powers the Sun and produces all the heat and light the Sun emits. Energy from the core is carried outward by radiation, which bounces around the radiative zone, taking about 170,000 years to get from the core to the top of the convective zone. The temperature drops below 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius) in the convective zone, where large bubbles of hot plasma (a soup of ionized atoms) move upwards. The surface of the Sun—the part we can see—is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius).
Surface: The surface of the Sun, the photosphere, is a 300-mile-thick (500-kilometer-thick) region, from which most of the Sun's radiation escapes outward. This is not a solid surface like the surfaces of planets. Instead, this is the outer layer of the gassy star.
Magnetic Field: The Sun has a magnetic field that varies across the surface of the Sun. Its polar field is 1–2 gauss (0.0001–0.0002 T), whereas the field is typically 3,000 gauss (0.3 T) in features on the Sun called sunspots and 10–100 gauss (0.001–0.01 T) in solar prominences. The magnetic field varies in time and location. The quasi-periodic 11-year solar cycle is the most prominent variation in which the number and size of sunspots waxes and wanes.