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  Can the Sun be seen from the ISS?   The International Space Station is constantly blocked from seeing the Sun by all those pesky space mountains and space trees… as well as their annoying alien Ziggleglorkian neighbours’ constant construction of space skyscrapers that blot out the Sun’s wholesome light - despite such building projects clearly contradicting the Space Home Owners Association guidelines     Seriously.   The ISS is bathed in pure, unobstructed sunlight every 96 minutes - before being blocked by the Earth again 96 minutes after that     Each individual photon hitting the ISS has been travelling from the center of the Sun for about 300,000 years (and then the 8 minutes it takes to blast towards Earth from the Sun’s surface at… y’know… lightspeed) - so those 96 minute intervals really ain’t no thang   Also, the second that sunlight hits the ISS, all the exposed surfaces instantly heat up to 120°C… and when the ISS passes back into the Earth’s sha

  Will the sun shine forever?        The Sun shines by turning hydrogen into helium in its core. This process is called nuclear fusion. Fusion happens when lighter elements are forced together to become heavier elements. When this happens, a tremendous amount of energy is created. The famous scientist Albert Einstein discovered a formula which shows how much energy can be created from a small amount of mass. You may have heard of the famous formula E=mc2. E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. The speed of light is 186,000 miles or 300,000 km per second. So you can see that a tiny amount of matter can be changed into an enormous amount of energy. This can only happen in places which have extremely high pressures and temperatures. At the center of the Sun, the temperature reaches 16 million degrees K, and the pressure is more than a billion times the atmospheric pressure on Earth! The Sun converts about 5 million tons of mass into energy every second. This energy heats t