Scribd
Upload
53 views2 pages

Solar Wind and Flares: 100 Billion Tons of Dynamite Every Second More Than 100 Billion Stars in The Milky Way

The sun lies at the heart of the solar system, where it is by far the largest object. It holds 99.8 percent of the solar system's mass and is roughly 109 times the diameter of the Earth — about one million Earths could fit inside the sun. The visible part of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius), while temperatures in the core reach more than 27 million F (15 million C), driven by nuclear reactions. The sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. It orbits some 25,000 light-years from the galactic core, completing a revolution once every 250 million years or so.

Uploaded by

Mark Anthony Liwag Nama
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
53 views2 pages

Solar Wind and Flares: 100 Billion Tons of Dynamite Every Second More Than 100 Billion Stars in The Milky Way

The sun lies at the heart of the solar system, where it is by far the largest object. It holds 99.8 percent of the solar system's mass and is roughly 109 times the diameter of the Earth — about one million Earths could fit inside the sun. The visible part of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius), while temperatures in the core reach more than 27 million F (15 million C), driven by nuclear reactions. The sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. It orbits some 25,000 light-years from the galactic core, completing a revolution once every 250 million years or so.

Uploaded by

Mark Anthony Liwag Nama
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Compared with the billions of other stars in the universe, the sun is unremarkable.

But for Earth and the other planets


that revolve around it, the sun is a powerful center of attention. It holds the solar system together; pours life-giving
light, heat, and energy on Earth; and generates space weather.
The sun is a big star. At about 864,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) wide, it could hold 109 planet Earths across its
surface. If the sun were a hollow ball, more than a million Earths could stuff inside it. But the sun isn't hollow. It's filled
with scorching hot gases that account for more than 99.8 percent of the total mass in the solar system. How hot?
The temperature is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius) on the surface and more than 28
million degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 million Celsius) at the core.
Deep in the sun's core, nuclear fusion reactions convert hydrogen to helium, which generates energy. Particles of
light called photons carry this energy through the sun's spherical shell, called the radiative zone, to the top layer of
the solar interior, the convection zone. There, boiling motions of gases (like in a lava lamp) transfer the energy to the
surface. This journey takes more than a million years.
The sun's surface, or atmosphere, is divided into three regions: the photosphere, the chromosphere, and the solar
corona. The photosphere is the visible surface of the sun and the lowest layer of the atmosphere. Just above the
photosphere are the chromosphere and the corona, which also emit visible light but are only seen during a solar
eclipse, when the moon passes between the Earth and sun.
Solar Wind and Flares
In addition to light, the sun radiates heat and a steady stream of charged particles known as the solar wind. The
wind blows about 280 miles (450 kilometers) a second throughout the solar system. Every so often, a patch of
particles will burst from the sun in a solar flare, which can disrupt satellite communications and knock out power on
Earth. Flares usually stem from the activity of sunspots, cool regions of the photosphere related to a shifting
magnetic field inside the sun.
Like many energy sources, the sun is not forever. It is already about 4.5 billion years old and has used up nearly half
of the hydrogen in its core. The sun will continue to burn through the hydrogen for another five billion years or so, and
then helium will become its primary fuel. The sun will expand to about a hundred times its current size, swallowing
Earth and other planets. It will burn as a red giant for another billion years and then collapse into a white
dwarf about the size of planet Earth.

The sun lies at the heart of the solar system, where it is by far the largest object. It
holds 99.8 percent of the solar system's mass and is roughly 109 times the
diameter of the Earth about one million Earths could fit inside the sun.
The visible part of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees
Celsius), while temperatures in the core reach more than 27 million F (15 million C),
driven by nuclear reactions. One would need to explode 100 billion tons of dynamite
every second to match the energy produced by the sun, according to NASA.
The sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. It orbits some 25,000
light-years from the galactic core, completing a revolution once every 250 million
years or so. The sun is relatively young, part of a generation of stars known as
Population I, which are relatively rich in elements heavier than helium. An older
generation of stars is called Population II, and an earlier generation of Population III
may have existed, although no members of this generation are known yet.

Internal structure and atmosphere


The sun and its atmosphere are divided into several zones and layers. The solar
interior, from the inside out, is made up of the core, radiative zone and the
convective zone. The solar atmosphere above that consists of the photosphere,
chromosphere, a transition region and the corona. Beyond that is the solar wind, an
outflow of gas from the corona.
The core extends from the sun's center to about a quarter of the way to its surface.
Although it only makes up roughly 2 percent of the sun's volume, it is almost 15
times the density of leadand holds nearly half of the sun's mass. Next is the
radiative zone, which extends from the core to 70 percent of the way to the sun's
surface, making up 32 percent of the sun's volume and 48 percent of its mass. Light
from the core gets scattered in this zone, so that a single photon often may take a
million years to pass through.
The convection zone reaches up to the sun's surface, and makes up 66 percent of
the sun's volume but only a little more than 2 percent of its mass. Roiling
"convection cells" of gas dominate this zone. Two main kinds of solar convection
cells exist granulation cells about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) wide and
supergranulation cells about 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) in diameter.
The photosphere is the lowest layer of the sun's atmosphere, and emits the light we
see. It is about 300 miles (500 km) thick, although most of the light comes from its
lowest third. Temperatures in the photosphere range from 11,000 F (6,125 C) at
bottom to 7,460 F (4,125 C) at top. Next up is the chromosphere, which is hotter, up
to 35,500 F (19,725 C), and is apparently made up entirely of spiky structures
known as spicules typically some 600 miles (1,000 km) across and up to 6,000 miles
(10,000 km) high.
After that is the transition region a few hundred to a few thousand miles or
kilometers thick, which is heated by the corona above it and sheds most of its light
as ultraviolet rays. At the top is the super-hot corona, which is made of structures
such as loops and streams of ionized gas. The corona generally ranges from
900,000 F (500,000 C) to 10.8 million F (6 million C) and can even reach tens of
millions of degrees when a solar flare occurs. Matter from the corona is blown off as
the solar wind.

You might also like