Sir Winston Churchill - 45 years since he died

Full name: Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965)
born 30th of November, 1874, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, England
died  24th of  January, 1965, London

Tomorrow it is the 45th year since Sir Winston Churchill passed.

Son of Lord Randolph Churchill, a prominent Tory politician, and the American Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill was born on 30 November 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. He had an unhappy childhood and was an unpromising student who attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, before embarking on an army career. After joining the 4th Hussars in 1895, he saw service as both a soldier and a journalist, and his dispatches from India and South Africa attracted wide attention. While working as a journalist during the Boer War he was captured and made a prisoner-of-war before escaping.
Fame as a military hero helped him win election to the House of Commons in 1900 and become a Member of  Parliament (MP) for Oldham. But he became disaffected with his party and in 1904 joined the Liberal Party. When the Liberals won the 1905 election, Churchill was appointed undersecretary at the Colonial Office. In 1908 he entered the Cabinet as president of the Board of Trade, becoming home secretary in 1910. The following year he became first lord of the Admiralty (1911-1915). He held this post in the first months of World War One but after the disastrous Dardanelles expedition, for which he was blamed, he resigned. He joined the army, serving for a time on the Western Front. In 1917, he was back in government as minister of munitions. From 1919 to 1921 he was secretary of state for war and air, and from 1924-1929 was chancellor of the exchequer.
In the years before World War II, his warnings of the threat posed by Adolf Hitler’s Germany were repeatedly ignored. When war broke out, he was appointed to his old post as head of the Admiralty. After Neville Chamberlain resigned, Churchill headed a coalition government as prime minister (1940–45). He committed himself and the nation to an all-out war until victory was achieved, and his great eloquence, energy, and indomitable fortitude made him an inspiration to his countrymen, especially in the Battle of Britain. With Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, he shaped Allied strategy through the Atlantic Charter and at the Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran conferences. Though he was the architect of victory, his government was defeated in the 1945 elections. After the war he alerted the West to the expansionist threat of the Soviet Union. He led the Conservative Party back into power in 1951 and remained prime minister until 1955, when ill health forced his resignation.
For his many writings, including The Second World War (6 vol., 1948–53) he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953; his later works include his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (4 vol., 1956–58). He was knighted in 1953; he later refused the offer of a peerage. He was made an honorary U.S. citizen in 1963. Among other majors contributions to the history of the mankind it is worth mentioning that he came up with the term “Iron Curtain”. In his late years he attained heroic status as one of the titans of the 20th century.
Sit Winston Churchill died on 24 January 1965 and was given a state funeral.

10 Facts about the Sun

1. The sun is actually a star, the closest star to Earth
The sun is an average star, meaning its size, age, and temperature fall in about the middle of the ranges of these properties for all stars. While some in our galaxy are nearly as old as the universe, about 15 billion years, our sun is a 2nd-generation star, only 4.6 billion years old. Some of its material came from former stars.

* Velocity Relative to Near Stars: 19.7 km/s
* Spectral Type: G2 V
* Synodic Period: 27.2753 days
* Solar Constant (Total Solar Irradiance): 1.365 - 1.369 kW/m2

2. The sun is by far the largest object in the solar system
The sun contains over 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System (Jupiter contains most of the rest).

* Equatorial Radius: 695,500 km
* Equatorial Circumference: 4,379,000 km
* Volume: 1,142,200,000,000,000,000 km3
* Mass: 1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg
* Density: 1.409 g/cm3
* Surface Area: 6,087,799,000,000 km2


3. We have always known the sun
Unlike many other objects in our solar system, the sun has been known to humans since the dawn of time. There is no discovery date or discoverer.

4. Since its creation, the sun has used up about half of the hydrogen in its core
Over the next 5 billion years or so, it will grow steadily brighter as more helium accumulates in its core. As the supply of hydrogen dwindles, the Sun's core must keep producing enough pressure to keep the Sun from collapsing in on itself. The only way it can do this is to increase its temperature. Eventually it will run out of hydrogen fuel. At that point, it will go through a radical change which will most likely result in the complete destruction of the planet Earth.

5. The Greeks named the sun Helios but the Romans used the name Sol, which is still in use today. Because of the important role the sun plays in our lives, it has been studied, perhaps, more than any other object in the universe, outside out own planet Earth. Our Sun has inspired mythology in almost all cultures, including ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, Native Americans, and Chinese.

6. Ulysses was the first spacecraft to study our Sun's poles
Launched aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery and sent towards Jupiter with powerful booster rockets. After studying Jupiter for 17 days, Ulysses used the giant planet's gravity to hurl it into an orbit out of the Ecliptic Plane, where planets orbit our Sun.

The other primary Solar mission is SOHO. The international Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has been keeping a steady watch on the Sun since April 1996.
7. The sun's strong gravitational pull holds Earth and the other planets in place
It keeps the planets orbiting inside the solar system:

* Equatorial Surface Gravity: 274.0 m/s2
* Escape Velocity: 2,223,720 km/h

8. The sun is made up of distinctive areas
In addition to the energy-producing solar core, the interior has two distinct regions: a radiative zone and a convective zone. From the edge of the core outward, first through the radiative zone and then through the convective zone, the temperature decreases from 8 million to 7,000 K. It takes a few hundred thousand years for photons to escape from the dense core and reach the surface.

9. How does the sun's "surface" and "atmosphere" compare to planets?
The "surface," known as the photosphere, is just the visible 500-km-thick layer from which most of the Sun's radiation and light finally escape, and it is the place where sunspots are found. Above the photosphere lies the chromosphere ("sphere of color") that may be seen briefly during total solar eclipses as a reddish rim, caused by hot hydrogen atoms, around the Sun. Temperature steadily increases with altitude up to 50,000 K, while density drops to 100,000 times less than in the photosphere.

10. An unsolved mystery of the sun involves the corona ("crown")
Above the chromosphere lies the corona ("crown"), extending outward from the Sun in the form of the "solar wind" to the edge of the solar system. The corona is extremely hot - millions of degrees kelvin. Since it is physically impossible to transfer thermal energy from the cooler surface of the Sun to the much hotter corona, the source of coronal heating has been a scientific mystery for more than 60 years.