The Sun
The Sun is the name we have given to our Parent Star, it is one of approximately a hundred billion stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy.
We call it our Parent Star as the Earth, and all the other planets in the Solar System, were created by all the left-over bits from when the Sun burst into life around 4,600,000,000 years ago. Everything around us including ourselves came from the sun.
The Solar System is the area of space that is under the control of the Sun’s gravity, this stretches out approx. 186 billion miles from the Sun’s surface. Mercury is the closest to the Sun and the Oort cloud is the furthest away.
The Scale of Things
When you try to explain how big the Sun is and how far Earth is from it, the distances are beyond comprehension, the easiest way to imagine the scale is to use things we know. So, imagine the Sun is a regular sized football (soccer ball) and the Earth, in comparison, is a tiny peppercorn.
Place the football on the centre spot of a football pitch in the middle of England, then walk 25 metres towards the goal (approximately a quarter of the pitch) and place the peppercorn there to represent the Earth’s size and distance from the Sun.
If you took another football 4,000 miles away to India that would be the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri around 4 and a quarter light years away.
A light year is the distance that light travels in one Earth year, which is 5.88 x 1012 (trillion) miles or 9.46×1012 km. The speed of light is 670,616,629 miles per hour (186,000 miles per second) or 4,317,011,395,200 metres per hour (299,792,458 metres per second).
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way
The Milky Way is a large disc made up of around 100 billion stars, the diameter of which is around 200,000 light years across. Our Sun is about 27,000 light years from the centre, it is believed that at the centre of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole, it has been named Sagittarius A*, approximately 4 million solar masses (which is 4 million times bigger than our Sun).
It is like a huge version of the Solar System. The enormous mass of a black hole means its gravity reaches out thousands of light years pulling the stars around it in a constant swirl.
What is the Sun Wheel
The Sun Wheel is the Earth’s orbit around the Sun which takes 365 and a quarter days.
The Sun is the hub or centre of the wheel, the eight festivals are the spokes, and the orbit of the Earth around the Sun is the rim, as shown in the Sunwheel Calendar.
The Earth’s polar axis is tilted by 23.5 degrees to the plane of it’s orbit; this is how we get the seasons.
The Northern hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun in June the time of our Summer Solstice. Six months later in December and the Winter Solstice, the Southern hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun.
In March and September, the Equinoxes – both North and South, have equal amounts of sunlight.
The Sun God and Mother Earth
Before Christianity spread across the world, most native cultures worshiped the Sun in one way or another. All over Mexico and Central America, you will find temples built to mark key events in the Sun’s calendar. Some like the Aztec, Inca and Mayan pyramids have steps leading up to the sky, for people watching from the ground it would have looked as though the priests, on top, could touch the Sun.
Harvest time is still celebrated although the God has changed, we still honour the union between the Sun and the Earth with a display of our bountiful crops of vegetables, fruit and corn. All of this is possible because our planet Earth is the perfect distance from the Sun for life to evolve, if we were any closer it would be too hot and any further away too cold. This relationship is unique, it couldn’t happen anywhere else and yet, the way modern man is destroying it you would think we have somewhere else to go. But we don’t. This is the only planet that can support life in our Solar System, the nearest star that may or may not have a planet similar to this one is 4 and a half lightyears away.
So, we must take better care of our planet, our dear Mother Earth.
Morien Ravenstone
On behalf of The Sunwheel Grove Druid Order