how big is the sun's magnetic field?

Question

i was jus wondering if it bigger than the solar system itself since the sun is so huge and choc full of energy

Answer 1

What you are referring to is the "heliopause", which is the limit of the Sun's magnetic reach and is estimated to be up to14 billiion miles from the Sun. Currently, Voyager I is approaching this milestone, as it has just entered 'terminal shock'. "This is where the million-mile-per-hour solar winds slows to about 250,000 miles per hour—the first indication that the wind is nearing the heliopause" (far beyond the limits of our solar system). It is estimated that both Voyagers I and II will reach the heliopause in 10-20 years, at their current speed.

This is one of mankind's greatest stories.

Answer 2

No, its not bigger than the whole Solar System.

We're lucky because the Earth rotates as a solid mass, so we have a simple magnetic field with only two poles. The sun, however is not so fortunate because it is made of plasma (not solid). This plasma doesn't rotate evenly, going faster at its equator (one revolution every 25 Earth days) than at the poles (roughly one revolution every 35 Earth days). Because of this "differential rotation," the Sun is covered by magnetic poles, an estimated one to ten million to be exact. All that churning plasma causes the magnetic field lines to become twisted and intertwined. If you look at the surface of the Sun, you can see these field lines as coronal loops and prominences, which perfectly outline the magnetic fields. To get a feel for how big the Sun's magnetic field is, those loops I just described are so big that you could slide Jupiter right through them. And where these magnetic fields are at their most twisted and complex is where sunspots occur. Wildly interesting phenomenon, aren't they?

Answer 3

I know this might sound silly, but the Sun's gravitational field is so strong that it affects the former planet Pluto (now called something less than a planet) which is 3.7 billion miles away (on average). The silly part is that I assume you want a numerical measurement of the Sun's gravitational pull, and I can't give you one that makes sense. The closer you are to the Sun, and the more mass you have, the stronger the pull is. As an average human being, weighing 100 to 250 pounds (on the Earth) you and I don't have a significant amount of mass as compared to the planets Earth, or Mars.

Also, please consider this...you know how violent the steam from boiling water can become if trapped. That is the force that early mechanical designers used to develop mechanized transportation in steam engines and steam ships. Well, gases such as hydrogen are also very volatile and hard to control when they are very hot, or in an intensely hot liquid state. Hydrogen gas here on Earth is so light that it rises and was used in early blimps for lift. The Sun's gravity is so strong that it can pull hydrogen gas back into itself even when the gas is super, super hot at temperatures around 10,000 degrees (Estimated temperature of the surface of the Sun).

On Earth hydrogen is the lightest thing we have, and hot hydrogen is even harder to control. Naturally, here on Earth we have an atmosphere which contains abundant quantities of Oxygen which easily reacts with Hydrogen to form a rapid explosion (2H + O = H2O). On the Sun that reaction does not happen because of a lack of oxygen there. But, the important thing to note is that the Sun's gravity is so intense that it can retain liquid molten hydrogen. Deep within the Sun the huge volume of gases (which make up the star itself) press down on a central core where it is suspected that hydrogen is even changed into a super, super dense material that is even metallic in nature because it is so dense (and of course hotter than anything we can duplicate here on Earth. The book ASTRONOMY, by Ian Ridpath, estimates that the core temperatures on the Sun are about 127 Million Degrees F. Wow...that is really hot.

And, to give you some kind of perspective with which to consider all of this...If the Sun was a ball the size of a common softball used in sports, the Earth would be about the size of a pin head. In other terms, the Earth has a diameter of roughly 8,000 miles. The Sun's diameter is 896,000 miles. So the Sun is much, much bigger than the Earth. Yet all of our experience relating to gravity comes from living here on the Earth. We see little direct evidence of the Sun's gravity until we look at the other massive objects in our Solar System.

Answer 4

The thing about fields (magnetic fields, gravitational fields, electrical fields) is that they technically extend out to infinity. Of course, there's always some distance where the field is overpowered by similar fields from other objects, but it can be hard to say where that is exactly. You may find some interesting details if you search wikipedia for these terms: magnetosphere, heliosphere, heliopause, Interplanetary Magnetic Field (especially that last one).

Answer 5

It's zero. The magnetic fields of all the particles and bodies around the sun cancel out. hehehe

Answer 6

The magnetic field of any body is part of the atmosphere that sourrounds it. In this case, if the sun's magnetic field was larger than the entire solar system, we would be in it's atmosphere, and this is simply not true. The size of it's magnetic field is the same size as the atmosphere around it, just as the Earth's magnetic field is the same size as our atmosphere.