Entrance to The Sun: Living with our star © Jody Kingzett Courtesy of the Science Museum Group
The sun is a star, and not a particularly remarkable one. This everyday observation conceals a powerful contradiction in our daily experience. For us Earth-dwellers, it is not just any old star, it is our star, the star which utterly dominates existence on our planet. Whatever their vital statistics, all the other stars in the sky are mere extrapolations of it: our sun literally outshines them all.
And yet for most of human history the sun has been an ineffable mystery. You can…
