With a diameter of around 120 times of the Earth, the Sun is the largest object in our solar system. As yellow dwarf and belonging to the so called low- to medium-mass stars, our Sun knows a certain life cycle starting from birth (happened some 4,5 billion years ago), main sequence star (now half in this phase lasting for about 10 billion years), red giant (for about a billion year) before throwing of its outer layers and evolving to a white dwarf lasting for another couple of billion years while cooling off to a black dwarf. The black dwarf is a theoretic speaking object as the process to this point takes so long that in our universe, with an age of about 13,7 billion years, presumable none has evolved this far, so by now still no observations.

So we have currently another 5 billion years ahead with the Sun in the stage as we know today. It gives warmth and energy to the entire solar system with at its surface a temperature of around 6000°C, inside presumable even as high as15,5 million °C. Earth rotates once every 24 hours on its polar axis leading to day and night.  Earth circles around the Sun in about 365 days and due to a certain tilt of the Earth's polar axis relative to this circling movement this leads to the four seasons.

In our atmosphere, the Sun often gives way to optical effects. In some cases it's done by human interaction like with airplanes. On the picture with a rising Sun, it seems that the engines of the plane are on fire. But this is nothing more than an optic illusion: the engines produce warm air and due to the angle towards the Sun, the different breaking index of these pipes of warm air are just reflecting the sunlight.   
 

More pictures of planes encountering the Sun or Moon via this link