Galileo, in 1612, demonstrated that the Sun rotates on its axis with a rotation period of approximately one month. Our star turns in a west-to-east direction, like the orbital motions of the planets. The Sun, however, is a gas and does not have to rotate rigidly, the way a solid body like Earth does. Modern observations show that the Sun’s rotation speed varies according to latitude; that is, it’s different as you go north or south of the Sun’s equator.  Between 1826 and 1850, Heinrich Schwabe, a German pharmacist and amateur astronomer kept daily records of the number of sunspots. What he was looking for was a planet inside the orbit of Mercury, which he hoped to find by observing its dark silhouette as it passed between the Sun and Earth. Unfortunately, he failed to find the hoped-for planet, but his diligence paid off with an even more important discovery: the sunspot cycle. He found that the number of sunspots varied systematically, in cycles about a decade long. In this laboratory, you will engage in tracking the Sun like Galileo and Schwabe during a six-day cycle and then do a simple calculation of the rotational period of our sun.---------------------------------------Distant Nature: Astronomy Exercises 2016 by Stephen Tuttle under license "Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike".

Students are introduced to our Sun as they explore its composition, what is happening inside it, its relationship to our planet (our energy source), and the ways engineers help us learn about it.

The purpose of this lesson is to introduce the students to the Sun. They explore various aspects of the Sun including its composition, its interior workings, and its relationship to the Earth.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"As we go about our daily lives, we aren’t generally aware of the forces generated by solar activity or the earth’s magnetic field. While these planetary changes are well documented, precisely how they affect human beings is less clear. To answer this question, researchers have turned to the autonomic nervous system – the subconscious control system that regulates bodily functions such as breathing and digestion. Their findings suggest that our nervous systems are well attuned to the energetic fluctuations that ripple through our solar system. The work builds on observations made by the famed astronomer Alexander Chizhevsky during World War I. He noted that battles intensify during peak solar flare periods and that major human events and behaviors closely follow the cycle of the sun – which led to the hypothesis that some unknown solar forces affect human health and behavior, providing a provocative link between events occurring in our solar system and life on Earth..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.