• Question: how hot is the sun

    Asked by anon-285896 on 4 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Miriam O'Duill

      Miriam O'Duill answered on 4 Mar 2021:

      The sun’s outer shell is about 5,500 C (which is already so hot it blows my mind), but the core is even hotter (about 15,700,000 C)! The core of the sun is so hot and the pressure there is so high, that nuclear fusion occurs. This is where most of the chemical elements come from: a star (such as our sun) consists mainly of hydrogen. Inside the star’s core, the hydrogen atoms fuse together, producing energy (hear and light) and heavier elements (such as helium, and later in the star’s lifetime carbon and even iron).

    • Photo: Jesko Koehnke

      Jesko Koehnke answered on 4 Mar 2021:

      At its core about 16 million °C, and that is where it fuses around 600 million tons of hydrogen to helium every second. Which is just incredible and the furnace that produces all chemical elements you can find in nature. At the surface, and where that is is of course difficult to say with a ball of gas, it is just about 6,000 °C. Generally people mean what is called the photosphere when they talk about the “surface”, and that is where the ball of gas becomes opaque to visible light. Strangely enough the temperature above that “surface” goes up again to about 500,000 °C, and I do not think we quite understand why yet.

    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 4 Mar 2021:

      It depends where you look in the Sun. The yellow surface is around 5800 degreesC (that’s what the yellow tells us as the surface of the Sun is a black-body radiator). But the core of the Sun is many millions of degC as that’s what we need for nuclear fusion to happen.

    • Photo: Ane Valera

      Ane Valera answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      Your conventional home oven can reach up to 250C and sometimes 300C, depending on the model. A wood oven can reach up to 700C. The sun temperature is like taking 7 or 8 wood ovens together at a time!! around 5000C! It’s unbelievable!!

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