How the Sun Works

A 2023 study published in the journal Life suggests that life's building blocks might have originated from interactions between the sun's energetic particles and Earth's early atmosphere [Phys.org]. Through a series of experiments, researchers were able to demonstrate how solar particles colliding with gases like carbon dioxide, molecular nitrogen and methane could produce amino acids and carboxylic acids — fundamental components of proteins and organic life.

To better understand how life began, scientists often focus on how the pieces needed for life — amino acids — first formed. One idea, thought up in the 1800s by Charles Darwin, suggests that life might have started in a "warm little pond" of chemicals that received energy from lightning.

In 1953, Stanley Miller recreated this idea in a lab, generating amino acids from a mixture of methane, ammonia, water and molecular hydrogen exposed to simulated lightning. Subsequent research challenged Miller's approach, revealing differences in Earth's early atmospheric composition.

But was lightning the main energy source? Maybe not.

For the 2023 study, lead author Vladimir Airapetian used data from NASA's Kepler mission to suggest that powerful solar eruptions called superflares from the young sun could have triggered chemical reactions when colliding with Earth's atmosphere.

According to the solar nebula theory, the sun formed around 4.5 billion years ago from a massive cloud of gas and dust in space [source: NASA]. Imagine a huge cloud in space that shrinks and spins because of outside forces. This cloud becomes a flat, spinning disk, called a solar nebula. In the middle of this disk, a baby star forms and gathers material around it.

Small particles in the disk stick together and make bigger pieces, like building blocks, which turn into baby planets. When the baby star gets really hot, it starts to shine by turning hydrogen into helium, and that's when it becomes the sun. The baby planets orbit, they collect more pieces from the disk and grow into the planets we know.

As time goes on, the planets get heated up and change inside. The sun's energy makes a breeze that blows away leftover gas, showing us the planets, moons, asteroids and comets.

The sun is a star, just like the other stars we see in the evening sky. The difference is distance: The other stars we see are light-years away, while our sun lies only about eight light minutes away — many thousands of times closer.

­Officially, the sun is classified as a G2 type star, based on its temperature and the wavelengths or spectrum of light that it emits. There are lots of G2s out there, and Earth's sun is merely one of billions of st­ars that orbit the center of our galaxy, made up of the same substance and components.

The sun is composed of gas. It has no solid surface. However, it still has a defined structure. The three major structural areas of the sun are shown in the upper half of Figure 1. They include:

Above the surface of the sun is its atmosphere, which consists of three parts, shown in the lower half of Figure 1:

­All of the major features of the sun can be explained by the nuclear reactions that produce its energy, by the sun's magnetic fields resulting from the movements of the gas and by its immense gravity. (Because of its size, the sun has enough gravitational force to hold all of the planets in their orbits around the sun.)

The sun's core starts from the center and extends outward to encompass 25 percent of the star's radius. Its temperature is greater than 15 million degrees Kelvin [source: Montana]. At the core, gravity pulls all of the mass inward and creates an intense pressure.

The pressure is high enough to force atoms of hydrogen to come together in nuclear fusion reactions — something we try to emulate here on Earth. Two atoms of hydrogen are combined to create helium-4 and energy in several steps:

These reactions account for 85 percent of the sun's energy. The remaining 15 percent comes from the following reactions:

­The helium-4 atoms are less massive than the two hydrogen atoms that started the process, so the difference in mass is converted to energy, as described by Einstein's theory of relativity (E = mc²). The energy is emitted in various forms of light: ultraviolet light, X-rays, visible light, infrared, microwaves and radio waves.

The sun also emits energized particles (neutrinos, protons) that make up the solar wind. This energy strikes Earth, where it warms the planet, drives our weather and provides energy for life. We aren't harmed by most of the UV radiation or solar wind because the Earth's atmosphere protects us.

The radiative zone extends outward from the core, accounting for 45 percent of the sun's radius. In this zone, the energy from the core is carried outward by photons, or light units. As one photon is made, it travels about 1 micron (1 millionth of a meter) before being absorbed by a gas molecule.

Upon absorption, the gas molecule is heated and re-emits another photon of the same wavelength. The re-emitted photon travels another micron before being absorbed by another gas molecule and the cycle repeats itself; each interaction between photon and gas molecule takes time.

Approximately 1,025 absorptions and re-emissions take place in this zone before a photon reaches the surface, so there is a significant time delay between a photon being made in the core and one reaching the surface.

The convective zone, which is the final 30 percent of the sun's radius, is dominated by convection currents that carry the energy outward to the surface. These convection currents are rising movements of hot gas next to falling movements of cool gas: It looks kind of like glitter in a simmering pot of water.

The convection currents carry photons outward to the surface faster than the radiative transfer that occurs in the core and radiative zone. With so many interactions occurring between photons and gas molecules in the radiative and convection zones, it takes a photon approximately 100,000 to 200,000 years to reach the surface.

Just like Earth, the sun boasts it own atmosphere, which is composed of the photosphere, the chromosphere and the corona.

Photosphere

This is the lowest region of the sun's atmosphere and the area that we can see. The surface of the sun typically refers to the photosphere, at least in lay terms. It is 180 to 240 miles (around 290 to 390 km wide) and between 4,000 and 6,000 degrees Kelvin (from the top to the bottom).

It appears granulated or bubbly, much like the surface of a simmering pot of water. The bumps are the upper surfaces of the convection current cells beneath; each granulation can be 600 miles (1,000 km) wide.

As we pass up through the photosphere, the temperature drops and the gases, because they are cooler, do not emit as much light energy. This makes them less opaque to the human eye. Therefore, the outer edge of the photosphere looks dark due to an effect called limb darkening that accounts for the clear crisp edge of the sun's surface.

Chromosphere

The area extends above the photosphere to about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers). The temperature rises across the chromosphere from 4,500 degrees Kelvin to about 10,000 degrees Kelvin. The chromosphere is thought to be heated by convection within the underlying photosphere.

As gases churn in the photosphere, they produce shock waves that heat the surrounding gas and send it piercing through the chromosphere in millions of tiny spikes of hot gas called spicules.

Each spicule rises to approximately 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) above the photosphere and lasts only a few minutes. Spicules may also follow along magnetic field lines of the sun, which are made by the movements of gases from the solar interior.

Corona

This final layer of the sun extends several million miles or kilometers outward from the other spheres. The corona can be seen best during a solar eclipse and in X-ray images of the sun. The temperature of the corona averages 2 million degrees Kelvin.

Although no one is sure why the corona is so hot, it is thought to be caused by the sun's magnetism. The corona has bright areas (hot) and dark areas called coronal holes. Coronal holes are relatively cool and thought to be areas where particles of the solar wind escape.

T­hrough telescope images we can see several interesting features on the sun that can have effects here on Earth. Let's take a look at three of them: sunspots, solar prominences and solar flares.

Sunspots

These cool, dark areas appear on the photosphere — always in pairs — and are intense magnetic fields (about 5,000 times greater than the Earth's magnetic field) that break through the surface. Field lines leave through one sunspot and reenter through the other one. The magnetic field is caused by movements of gases in the sun's interior.

Sunspot activity occurs as part of the solar cycle, an 11-year cycle with periods of maximum and minimum activity. It is not known what causes this cycle, but there are two primary hypotheses:

Solar Prominences

­Occasionally, clouds of gases from the chromosphere will rise and orient themselves along the magnetic lines from sunspot pairs. These arches of gas are called solar prominences.

Prominences can last two to three months and extend 30,000 miles (50,000 km) or more above the sun's surface. Up­on reaching this height, they can erupt for a few minutes to hours and send large amounts of material racing through the corona and outward into space at 600 miles per second (1,000 km per second); these eruptions are called coronal mass ejections.

Solar Flares

Sometimes in complex sunspot groups, abrupt, violent explosions from the sun occur. These are called solar flares. They are thought to be caused by sudden magnetic field changes in areas where the sun's magnetic field is concentrated. They're accompanied by the release of gas, electrons, visible light, ultraviolet light and X-rays.

When this radiation and these particles reach the Earth's magnetic field, they interact with it at the poles to produce the auroras (borealis and australis). Solar flares can also disrupt communications, satellites, navigation systems and even power grids.

The radiation and particles ionize the atmosphere and prevent the movement of radio waves between satellites and the ground (or between the ground and the ground). The ionized particles in the atmosphere can induce electric currents in power lines and cause power surges. These power surges can overload a power grid and cause blackouts. Learn more about solar flares by reading: Could an extremely powerful solar flare destroy all the electronics on Earth?

All of this activity requires energy, which is in limited supply. Eventually, the sun will run out of fuel.

T­he sun has been shining for about 4.5 billion years [source: NASA]. The size of the sun is a balance between the outward pressure made by the release of energy from nuclear fusion and the inward pull of gravity.

The sun has enough hydrogen fuel to "burn" for a little over 5 billion years but will continue to burn for at least 5 billion more years after that fuel is depleted [source: National Geographic].

When the core runs out of hydrogen fuel, it will contract under the weight of gravity; however, some hydrogen fusion will occur in the upper layers. As the core contracts, it heats up and this heats the upper layers causing them to expand. As the outer layers expand, the radius of the sun will increase and it will become a red giant, an elderly star.

The radius of the red giant sun will be 100 times what it is now, lying just beyond the Earth's orbit, so the Earth will plunge into the core of the red giant sun and be vaporized. At some point after this, the core will become hot enough to cause the helium to fuse into carbon.

When the helium fuel has exhausted, the core will expand and cool. The upper layers will expand and eject material. Finally, the core will cool into a white dwarf. Eventually, it will further cool into a nearly invisible black dwarf. This entire process will take a few billion years.

So for the next several billion years, humanity is safe — in terms of the sun's existence, at least. Other debacles are anybody's guess.