The Sun

The Suns Layers

Everyone knows the sun is what gives us light, much of our heat, and is vital to life on Earth, however there are many intriguing aspects that people do not know. The sun was formed four and a half billion years ago from the gas of a collapsing space cloud. This cloud continued to contract until the core was able to sustain nuclear fusion, which maintains energy balance between the energy being released into space from the suns surface and the core. The sun is roughly halfway through its ten-billion year lifetime, after which the suns “fuel” will run out and gravitational contraction will resume. The sun’s structure from inside out is the core, radiation zone, convection zone. Then, its atmosphere is made up of the photoshpere, chromoshpere, and the corona (the outer most layer of the sun’s atmosphere). In the sun’s core the temperature reaches around 15 million kelvin and the pressure is 200 billion times that on earth’s surface. In the next layer up, radiation zone, the temperature cools to around 10 million kelvin. Here, energy moves out in the form of photons. After this layer their is the convection zone, here the the cooler gas from the surface falls and the hotter gas rises. The sun is quite incredible in many ways and the extremes of the suns size, temperature, and gravity make it difficult to really comprehend.

One thought on “The Sun

  1. Interesting read! I particularly enjoyed your image and how you broke down each layer of the sun. We often just think of the sun as a single entity but don’t realize that, like an onion, it has layers! It also makes me wonder if other stars are very similar to our sun in terms of their layering seen as how they are made of similar elements.

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