What does the core of the sun look like? That's a great question. We need to go on an adventure to answer!
Introduction: This is an interesting science popularization that interprets the core and structure of the sun from the perspective of space travel.
Take a walk-and-go trip – explore the core of the sun together
What does the core of the sun look like?
We're going to take a journey to the center of the sun. Take the spacecraft to the surface of the Sun, 14.8 billion kilometers from Earth, and begin our journey. The surface of the Sun is very hot, the temperature here is about 5700 degrees Celsius, and the sunlight is particularly bright and dizzying. When we looked closer, bubbles appeared on the surface, like boiling water. Some bubbles look darker than others because they are slightly colder than others, but anywhere on the sun's surface is still particularly hot.
From one area to another – continuing our journey, we flew through a huge bubble on the surface toward our first stop: the convection zone.
Around us is a hot fluid called plasma, where rising hot gases and falling cold gases fill them with bubbles. Bubbles are moving, growing and contracting. As our spaceship continues to fly down, it will even shake like a boat in the sea.
After continuing to fly down for about 200,000 kilometers (that's about 15 times the length of the entire Earth!). The shaking stopped, and we reached the second stop: the radiation zone.
This part of the sun is very hot. Now the temperature outside our spacecraft has reached 2 million degrees. If we can see individual particles of light (photons), we will see them bouncing between the tiny particles (atoms) that make up the plasma.
These irregular beats are a dance that scientists call "random walking." It takes hundreds of thousands of years for a photon to randomly come out of this layer.
Our ship is moving at full speed, so we're moving through the radiation zone much faster.
The weight of all the plasma above us presses down means that the plasma around us is denser than gold, and the temperature is soaring to 15 million degrees! We quickly reached the last stop of the journey, the core of the sun.
Welcome to the core of the sun — before we get into the core, we'll have to shrink to the size of an atom. This is the only way we can see what is happening at the core, because what we're trying to see is atoms that are millions of times smaller than a grain of sand.
The core of the sun is home to the lightest element in the universe, the hydrogen atom, of hundreds of millions of universes. Extremely high temperatures and great pressures press these hydrogen atoms so close that they squeeze each other, forming new, heavier atoms.
This is nuclear fusion. Hydrogen atoms squeeze each other to form a completely different kind of atom, helium.
So what can we actually see in the core of the sun? Everything we can see is pink and very dazzling.
We can't be entirely sure what the solar core looks like as seen by the human eye, but we see in laboratories on Earth that hydrogen plasma is pink. So we can make a scientific guess that the hydrogen plasma in the sun's core looks the same.
In fusion experiments at lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States, a hydrogen plasma glows pink. Marilyn Chung/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
When atoms merge with each other, they release a lot of energy in the form of light. Light moves upward through the core, enters the radiation zone, and reflects around the radiated zone until it finally enters the convection zone. The light then reaches the surface of the Sun through a large number of plasma bubbles, and then it can travel freely and undisturbed through the universe.
Now it's time to leave the hottest part of the solar system and return to Earth. Our journey takes us deep into the interior of the Sun for 700,000 kilometers, through bubbles in convection zones, through billions of beams of light in radiation zones, into the mysterious core of atomic fusion.
When we land on Earth, look up at the sun in the sky as if we were looking back in the past. We now know that the light we see was produced hundreds of thousands of years ago in the hottest parts of the solar system!
Related knowledge
The core of the Sun refers to an area no more than one-fifth or a quarter of the Sun's radius from the center of the Sun,[37] with a density of up to 150 g/cm3[38][39] about 150 times the density of water, and a temperature approaching 15.7 million K. By comparison, the temperature on the Surface of the Sun is only about 5,800 K. According to recent data analysis from the Solar and Solar Wind Explorer missions, the solar core rotates faster than in other regions, such as the radiation belt.
For much of the sun's formation, the energy of nuclear fusion is produced through a series of processes known as proton-proton chain reactions, which turn hydrogen into helium,[40] and only 1.7% of helium is produced through the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle. Compared with the cores of the eight planets of the Sun, the eight planets may have the core of nickel-iron alloys, and the Sun accounts for more than 99% of the mass of the solar system, and the role of nickel-iron alloys in the interior of the Sun cannot be ignored. The core is the only region of the Sun that can generate a lot of energy through nuclear fusion, 99% of the energy is generated within 24% of the Sun's radius, and at 30% radius, the fusion reaction almost completely stops.
The outer layer of the sun is simply heated by the energy coming out of its core. The energy generated by nuclear fusion in the core first needs to pass through the multi-layered area connected from the inside to the outside to reach the photosphere, and then become the kinetic energy of light waves or particles and disperse to the outer cosmic space.
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FY: Limestone
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