The Sun

The Layers and Characteristics of the Sun

• The sun has an atmosphere composed of the photosphere, chromosphere, and corona, containing the overflowing energy from its inner core.
• Light from the sun's atmospheric layers takes approximately 8 minutes to reach Earth, despite the sun being km away.
• The corona, the outermost layer, produces solar winds, is less dense than the sun, and is extremely hot.
• The chromosphere, a layer of plasma, produces reddish warm colors during eclipses and reaches over a million degrees Fahrenheit.
• The photosphere emits the most visible light and is documented to have boiling plasma, solar flares, and darker sunspots.
• The sun's "surface," the photosphere, ranges in temperature up to 5,800 K and is one of the sun's hottest atmospheric layers.
• The sun has three interior layers: the convection zone, radiative zone, and core, characterized by density and movements of plasma.
• The convection zone is nearly 200,000 km thick and is boiling from the heat and radiation steaming out of the inner layers.
• The radiative zone moves energy from nuclear fusion to other layers via radiation and protons are so packed that it can take thousands to millions of years to escape.
• The sun's core, the innermost layer, is the hottest part where temperatures reach up to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit and is approximately 86,000 miles thick.
• The sun is almost a million times larger than Earth, with an estimated 1.3 million Earths that could fit inside it.
• The sun is approximately 4.6 billion years old and is classified as a main-sequence star, estimated to remain in this stage for another 5 billion years before transitioning to the red giant stage.