This is the highest resolution image of the Sun ever taken. That tiny dot in the upper right is Earth.
- There’s 93 million miles between the sun and that tiny dot.
- The light we see from the sun is eight minutes old.
- The sun is a star, not a planet. A ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core
- The sun spins, or rotates, in the same direction as Earth. But, because it is a gas (3/4 hydrogen, 1/4 helium), its sections rotate at different speeds! The sun actually spins faster at its equator than at its poles.
It was the sun that God used to begin leading me back to him after I lost my Christian faith following the death of my son, Jordan.
I remember thinking one hot, summer afternoon in 2013,
“What are the odds that the sun is the perfect distance from earth, made of the perfect stuff, giving off the perfect temperature? A little further away – life isn’t possible. A little closer – life isn’t possible.”
It was a small step – but a step, nonetheless.
That small step led to a deep dive into the fine-tuning of the universe. The possibility of it all “just happening,” I discovered, required more faith than belief in Genesis, chapter one.
Nick