Sun

Where the name comes from

The English word Sun comes from old Germanic roots, but its Latin name, Sol, is the one that spread through science. It gives us solar, solstice, and the day Sunday. Every culture that watched the sky built something around it, because everything else depends on it.

What it actually is

Here is the honest part. The Sun is not special among stars. It is an ordinary ball of hydrogen, middling in size and temperature, fusing hydrogen into helium in its core and leaking the energy out as light. It only rules our sky because it is close, about eight light minutes away, while the next nearest star is more than four light years off.

The great coincidence

The Sun is about four hundred times wider than the Moon, and also about four hundred times farther away. So from Earth the two look almost exactly the same size. That is pure chance, and it is the only reason we get total eclipses, where the Moon covers the Sun so neatly you can see its outer glow.

The Sun in a birth chart

Astrologers read the Sun as the core of the self, the will, the vitality and the thing you are trying to become. Its sign is your Sun sign, the one horoscope columns use, and its house shows where in life you most want to shine. With the Moon and the Rising sign it makes up the big three. Traditionally it rules Leo, and it was counted as one of the two lights alongside the Moon, rather than an ordinary planet.

How to find yours

The Sun moves about one degree a day and takes a year to go round the zodiac, so your birth date alone almost always gives your Sun sign. It does not spend the same time in every sign. Hali’s ingress times for 1950 to 2049 give it an average of 31.5 days in Cancer and only 29.4 in Capricorn, because the Earth moves a little slower in its orbit in early July, when it is furthest from the Sun. If you were born on a day the Sun changed sign, you need the time to be sure. The zodiac dates pages list every change to the minute, and the guides start with Sun in Aries.

Common confusions

Your Sun sign is not the constellation the Sun was in when you were born. The tropical zodiac follows the seasons, and the stars have slipped by most of a sign since the system was set. Being born on the cusp also does not make you a blend of two signs. The Sun is always in one sign or the other, and the exact time settles it.