The Inner Layers of the Sun

It is very difficult to imagine how the world would be without the Sun. Just recently, in science class, we learned that the Sun is the source of energy that most animals and certainly all humans are not able to live without. I completely agree with this statement. After all, plants need the Sun to grow and they are the producers that start the entire food web. In science class, we learned that the Sun is 99.8 percent of the solar system’s total mass and that it has many inner layers. The center of the Sun is called the core, which is where the Sun’s energy comes from. This energy is produced by nuclear fusion – hydrogen atoms joining together to form helium. This helium is turned into energy which moves outward from the core, eventually escaping into space. The temperature in the core reaches about 15 million degrees Celsius!!! This is hot enough for nuclear fusion to take place. I guess that this is why we can’t send spaceships to explore the sun since the metal on them would melt in seconds! An interesting fact I found on an amazing website is that the Sun releases 5 million tons of pure energy in the process of nuclear fusion. This means that as the time is going on, the Sun is becoming lighter and lighter. Next, the middle layer of the Sun is the radiation zone. This is a tightly packed region of gas where energy, mostly in the form of electromagnetic radiation, is transferred. Since this zone is so dense, it takes more than 100,000 years for energy to move through it. I feel that this is like trying to move upward through quicksand with no tree branch to hold onto! The last layer of the Sun is the convection zone. It is the outermost layer of the Sun where hot gases rise from the bottom of the layer and get cooler when they reach the top. The cooler gases sink and move energy towards the Sun’s surface by forming loops of gas. As you can see, the Sun is a very large ball of hot, glowing gas. It is so large that 109 Earths can fit across the Sun’s disk and over 1.3 million Earths can fit inside the interior of the Sun! Actually, I’m not too surprised from listening to this fact, since the Sun does appear as a large circle in our sky, in spite of being so far away from us. The website that I had visited said that scientists feel that the Sun can live to appear in our sky for another five billion years, but after that, it will grow larger and larger and swallow up the entire planet Earth! The Sun will turn into a red giant and will soon become a white dwarf. Luckily, that event will occur many years in the future. Until then, scientists can research to reveal even more fascinating secrets about our Sun.

If you would like to visit an informational site on the Sun, you can go to this website:

http://www.solarviews.com/eng/sun.htm