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Sun Size Wise Lab Report

608 Words3 Pages

Joey Erberich
GEOS 109
September 28, 2014
Lab Report #2

The Sun, Size-Wise
The sun is the largest star in our solar system, and also the largest object all together. It is basically a huge ball of highly magnetic plasma that was formed 4.6 billion years ago. The sun provides the warmth needed for the earth, and holds a core temperature of 15.7 million kelvin. (www.universetoday.com) The sun, being the largest object in the solar system, has a mass of 1.99X10^30kg and a volume of 1.4X10^27. The sun takes up 98.6% of the solar system; it would take 1.3 million earths to fill the size of the sun. The sun has a diameter of 864,938 miles and a radius of 432,450 miles, with a circumference of 2,713,406 miles. (www.space.com)

What is the Sun? …show more content…

As the latitude changes, the angle to the sun, the units spread out and there is less energy per area. Different seasons also come with a variation of angles to the sun. Time of the day plays a role, for example the minimal insolation that comes at sunrise compared to the optimal insolation that comes when the sun is the highest at noon. Weather factors such as cloudiness also minimize the amount of energy that we can receive. (Wolfson and Lecture)

As For Wyoming… Wyoming has a solar insolation range of 4.21-6.21 kwh/m^2/day. Approximately 25% of the state is 4.92 kwh/m^2/day, 12.5% is 5.92 kwh/m^2/day, 6.25% is 4.21 kwh/m^2/day, 6.25% is 6.21 kwh/m^2/day, and 50% is 5.79 kwh/m^2/day. This makes the state’s average 5.498 kwh/m^2/day. Wyoming is approximately 97,818 miles^2 in area, so when multiplied by 1609.34 m per mile, is 157,422,420.1 m^2. This means that Wyoming can produce 865,508,465.8 kwh/m^2/day of solar insolation. Looking online, (www.eia.gov), I was unable to find the use of solar energy in Wyoming currently. I did find, however, that Wyoming in general sends off about two-thirds of overall energy produced to other states, and produces over a third of the entire country’s coal production. Wyoming is also the leading state in energy use per

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