I think you are not wrong, Alaskan. Just crossing sun should be ok aka in normal wear and tear (also depends on what's your altitude - in mountains you have stronger UV, if it is noon, morning or evening, etc.). How could there be pictures with sun on them anyway?
If you use some long focal lens, this might be much more dagnerous however (like using telescope without filter to see sun). In general, the damage can happen if camera is still and pointing long time to intense light source. And cameras are considered more sensitive than human eye. Imagine the situation where there is digital preview or long exposure (but in case of sun long exposure does not make sense obviously - but still morons exist and there have to be warning labels on microwaves to prevent people drying their pets in there).
Semiconductors are quite sensitive to temperature and if you know how CMOS sensor (I suppose it is not CCD, but even here) works than you can estimate how much is too much. Still with proper calculation (pixel size, treshold of damage, exposure time, power in, focus and a few other variables) this could be more precise, but I think it is not needed in your case. Just rough estimate. You can always check pixels for damage (they are black or different color they should be - like one channel is missing in case of RGB sensor), but even if you find some individual pixel (not many in row or column or some dead area) do not worry much about that - due to normal wear and tear you likely get dust inside the sensor and this will make some pixels not correctly percieving light - therefore not working. Still in jpeg compression this can be not noticeable (if you do not use best quality from raw generated).
