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You've Discovered the Bullis School Solar System! This website accompanies physical markers found on Bullis' campus. Click here to learn more!
The Center of our Solar System!
The Center of our Solar System!
Our entire solar system is dependent on the behavior of the sun. The sun has solar cycles and seasons, but these seasons do not behave like the seasons of a planet... Instead, the sun has seasons of high activity and low activity, exhibiting sunspots, flares, and mass coronal ejections during periods of high activity. This weather impacts all objects in our solar system, including Earth.
Location in the Galaxy
Location in the Galaxy
Our solar system is in the Orion Spur, between the Perseus Arm and the Carina–Sagittarius Arm
The Sun's Magnetic Field
The Sun's Magnetic Field
Electric currents that travel through the sun's magnetic field interact with all objects in our solar system, creating the tails we see on comets, the northern and southern lights on Earth, and possibly creating water on the moon.
The strength of the magnetic field at each pole slowly reduces to zero until it switches polarity. The switch happens around the peak of solar activity or the time we call solar maximum.
Size Comparison
Size Comparison
The sun is by far the largest object in our solar system, almost 109x the size of the Earth, which is why all the other objects in our system orbit the sun.
Smaller stars like our sun end their lives by ejecting their outer layers of gas into space over the course of about 10,000 years, leaving behind the star's hot core — a white dwarf. Radiation from the white dwarf causes the gas to glow, creating a unique and beautiful formation called a planetary nebula.
The formation of the sun was also the formation of our solar system. Not all stars form solar systems when they are created, but many do!
While the planets all orbit our sun, they are also moving as our solar system orbits our galactic center. This animation shows how the planets move with our sun.
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