Sun Science 2021 Forever Stamps — Solar Dynamics Observatory Images, Panes of 20

Issue facts

First Day of Issue: June 18, 2021
First Day City: Greenbelt, Maryland
Printed by: Banknote Corporation of America
Printing Method: Flexographic, Foil Stamping
Format: Panes of 20

The set

Ten designs, each showing a different solar feature or event, built from colorized imagery captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. This one is a coronal hole seen in extreme ultraviolet light. The colors are not decorative — each corresponds to a wavelength, and each wavelength reveals a different layer or process. The ceremony was held at the Greenbelt Main Post Office, since NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center was closed for the Juneteenth federal holiday.

What the Sun is doing

Our star is a G-type main-sequence star, with surface temperatures between roughly 5,300 and 6,000 Kelvin — about 9,000 to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Stars of this class generate heat and light through nuclear fusion in the core. The Sun converts 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, turning four million tons of matter into pure energy in the process.

Reactors on Earth run on fission, not fusion. Building a fusion reactor that produces more energy than it consumes remains extraordinarily expensive and technically unsolved — a useful reminder of the scale of what is happening 93 million miles away, for free.

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