What does the Sun’s core look like?



What does the Sun’s core look like?

We are about to take a journey to the center of the Sun. The action begins about 148 million kilometers from our planet when we arrive at the Sun’s surface in our space ship.


From zone to zone — We continue on our journey, driving through one of these giant bubbles on the surface, and head towards our first stop: the convective zone.


After traveling down for 200,000 kilometers (that’s about 15 times the width of the whole Earth!) the rocking finally stops. We’ve made it to our second stop, the radiative zone.





Welcome to the core — Before we enter the core, we’re going to have to shrink down to the size of an atom. It is the only way we will get to see what is happening in here because what we are trying to see in here is atoms, millions of times smaller than a grain of sand!

The core of the Sun is home to billions and billions of atoms of hydrogen, the lightest element in the universe. The immense pressure and heat push these atoms so close to one another that they squish together to create new, heavier atoms.




A hydrogen plasma in a fusion experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US glows with a pink color.Marilyn Chung / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

When atoms merge together, they release large amounts of energy in the form of light. The light works its way up through the core, into the radiative zone where it bounces around until it finally makes it into the convective zone. Then the light travels up to the surface of the Sun through massive bubbles of plasma, and from the surface, it is free to travel uninterrupted through the sky.

It’s time to leave the hottest place in our solar system and head back to Earth. Our journey has taken us 700,000 kilometers deep into the interior of the Sun, past the bubbles of the convective zone, through the billions of the light rays in the radiative zone and into the mysterious atom-fusing core.


This article was originally published on The Conversation by Sara Webb at the Swinburne University of Technology. Read the original article here.