Ep 613 - Solar System Part 1 (feat. Nate Marshall)

The Sun is so large that 1.3 million Earths could fit inside it, with its core reaching 15 million degrees Celsius, transforming matter into plasma. The corona, its outer atmosphere, is paradoxically hotter than its surface.

1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun. At the core, the sun is 15 million degrees Celsius. The surface of the sun is only air quotes about 5,500 degrees Celsius. The outer atmosphere... called the corona, which paradoxically reaches over 1 million degrees C.

The Sun's corona is hotter than its surface, violating thermodynamics, possibly due to billions of micro-flares from snapping electromagnetic fields. These larger electromagnetic field snaps cause solar flares, like the 1859 Carrington event, which set telegraphs on fire and could devastate modern internet infrastructure.

The corona violates the law. Basic basic physics. People still don't know why... the leading theory on the corona paradox... is due to electromagnetic fields snapping together in like you know in tiny tiny increments and each of the realignments generates heat in like micro flares. The biggest solar storm that hit Earth that we know of was the Carrington event, 1859. It was so strong that it set telegraph machines on fire. If such a solar flare happened today it would destroy the infrastructure of the entire internet.

The Sun's core generates light through nuclear fusion, where extreme heat and pressure cause hydrogen nuclei to overcome repulsion and fuse into helium. This process converts a tiny amount of mass into immense energy, as described by Einstein's E=MC².

The temperature gets the particles mass moving fast enough to overcome the repulsion... the pressure gets them close enough for the strong nuclear force to grab them together... This is the core is the only place in the solar system where both conditions are met at once. If you multiply something's mass... by the speed of light and then multiply that number by the speed of light again, you'll see how much energy has been converted in the process. So this is just think like you know E for energy, M for mass and let's do C for the speed of light and square that. You get I think it's like E= MC².

Gamma rays, generated in the Sun's core, are intensely destructive. They are trapped within the core for 10,000 to 17,000 years, slowly degrading into less harmful UV light before escaping to the surface and reaching Earth in 8 seconds.

A gamma ray would go right through you... it would sever anything it touched in terms of like your DNA cells... you become what's called a walking ghost and you just slowly die. The gamma rays produced by the particle fusion. It gets trapped in the sun's core... It bounces around on a weird 10 to 17,000 year journey inside of the core where it's slowly degraded into like lesser and lesser forms of energy... it comes out as UV light soon as it escapes the core and hits the you know basically surface of the sun. It takes eight seconds to get to Earth.

The Sun maintains a perfect balance for billions of years through a self-regulating mechanism: when fusion speeds up, it expands and cools, slowing fusion; when it contracts, it heats up, increasing fusion, effectively "breathing" to maintain stability.

When fusion speeds up, the sun expands... expands the core too which then naturally cools the core down... fusion slows down. So then the sun contracts again because everything cools down. It's it's literally self-regulating.