What is the Sun Made Of?
In today’s big news the Parker Solar Probe has officially launched to explore the sun in a never-before-done mission. But what is the sun made of?
Our sun is a big ball of gas and plasma. 91 percent of that gas is hydrogen, which is converted into energy in the sun’s core. The energy moves outward through the interior layers, into the sun’s atmosphere, and is released into the solar system as heat and light.
It’s important for Asgardia to know the inner workings of our star as it gives us life and could help further the goal of living in space.
Moreover, inside the sun’s core, gravitational forces result in immense pressure and temperatures. The temperature of the sun in this layer is around 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). Hydrogen atoms are compressed and fused together, resulting in helium. This process is known as nuclear fusion. As the gases heat up, molecules break apart into charged particles, turning the gas into plasma.
This energy, which is mostly in the form of gamma-ray photons and neutrinos, is carried into the radiative zone. Photons can randomly bounce around in this zone from somewhere between a few thousand to a few million years before travelling to the surface, as reported by Sten Odenwald on NASA’s Ask the Space Scientist page.
Furthermore, we don’t know we know how long it takes for a photon to travel outward from the center of the sun. Why? For one, scientists can’t see into the core to track a photon from its birth. Rather, they must depend on models that follow the infamous “drunkard’s walk” problem. In this scenario, the distance a drunken person travels while making random left and right turns is their typical step size times the square root of the number of steps taken.
For a randomly moving photon in the solar center, this is based on what is used for the mean free path (or average distance travel) of radiation. These numbers span from 4,000 years to millions of years. However, most solar scientists often believe it is 170,000 years.
Scientists also believe the sun’s magnetic field is produced by a magnetic dynamo in the radiative zone.
The convection zone (also called the convective region) is the outermost layer of the sun’s interior. It reaches from around 125,000 miles (200,000 km) deep up to the visible surface or the sun’s atmosphere. The temperature plunges below 3.5 million degrees F (2 million degrees C) in the convective zone, where hot plasma bubbles up toward the surface.
The convective motions carry heat to the surface quite quickly, which is the bottom layer of the sun’s atmosphere, or photosphere. This is the layer where the energy is released as sunlight. The light passes through the outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere — the chromosphere and the corona. Typically we can’t see these layers, but during a total solar eclipse, the chromosphere looks like a red rim around the sun, and the corona forms a white crown with plasma streamers spreading outward. The chromosphere gets its red colour from the abundance of hydrogen, as per the National Solar Observatory.
Experts who have examined the composition of the sun have chronicled 67 chemical elements in the sun. There may be more, but in amounts too small for our current tools to identify.
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When preparing news, materials from the following publications were used:
