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The Sun Is Weirder Than You Think – Transcript
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- The heliosphere is the sun's outer atmosphere, which swallows Earth and extends about 100 times farther than the distance between Earth and the Sun.
- The Parker Solar Probe crossed into the corona, which is the sun's inner atmosphere, and recorded electric and magnetic wave sounds converted into sound waves.
- Nuclear fusion in the sun's core occurs when four hydrogen nuclei smash together to form one helium atom, converting about .7% of the mass into energy.
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If you dove into the sun, the first layer you'd hit is hot enough to make diamonds boil. If you keep going, you're passing through churning bubbles the size of France. And then, you're lost in a zone so dense that light itself takes 170,000 years to escape. And you're still not at the place where it unleashes enough
energy to power all life on Earth. Right now, we're in a golden age of new solar science. We're getting close-up pictures of the sun's surface in more detail than ever before, sending probes into its atmosphere, and revealing secrets about our star we never thought possible. Trust me, after this video, you'll never look up at the sun the same
way. So, let me take you on a journey into the sun. >> >> This episode was made possible by AT&T, the official connectivity partner of Huge If True. A lot of people picture the sun as a giant ball of fire, but that's totally wrong. There's nothing
actually burning up there. Imagine you and I get into a magical spaceship and blast off toward the sun. As soon as we get about six times Earth's diameter away, our little ship is starting to detect something. We think we're on a journey into the sun, but really, >> is it true to say that in some sense we are inside the sun right now?
>> Oh, 100%. >> That is the head of heliophysics at NASA. He's in charge of all of NASA's research on the sun. And he's saying, if you zoom out to see our whole solar system, and then zoom a little bit further, you'd see that our sun's outer atmosphere actually swallows Earth and then keeps going. This is the heliosphere, and it's huge. It goes about 100 times farther than the distance between Earth and the Sun.
>> We are living, not just with a star, but living in a star's atmosphere, which is pretty cool. >> As we fly through it, we see that the heliosphere is made of the Sun blasting out these charged particles, more and more as we fly toward it. From here, we can see so much cool tech that humans have sent to study the Sun before us. We already passed around 40 satellites orbiting Earth studying the Sun. And now we're speeding past a very special one.
This is the Solar Dynamics Observatory. It's snapping pictures of the Sun in all these different wavelengths. >> It's one of the biggest data sets that we have at NASA, >> >> and it's frankly the beating heart of watching the Sun every day and its activity and its changes.
>> But we keep going closer, >> >> and there are still two spacecraft ahead of us. >> The two of them are Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe. >> Solar Orbiter is a big deal because it took the first ever pictures of the Sun's South Pole. For scale, here's how big the Earth would be in this video.
But only one spacecraft has ever gone into the Sun's inner atmosphere. At this point, our little ship is starting to feel more of the Sun's effects. Uh, that can't be good. But we need to keep going because the Sun is way farther away than most people think. If you paused the whole solar system at the closest point with a normal walking pace, it would take you over 3,000
years to reach the Sun. You could line up all of the planets between the Earth and the Sun 374 times. But it's not just the distance that's the problem. The Earth is rapidly moving sideways compared to the Sun. So, to get there, we have to cancel that out, which would take more energy than it would take to escape the entire solar system. That's why when NASA sent the Parker Solar it took over 6 years to spiral
inward until 2021, when it crossed into the corona. This is the sun's inner atmosphere. It's the part that you see during a solar eclipse, and it's beautiful. >> >> But up close, it's terrifying.
When Parker first crossed into it, the probe was still about nine times farther from the sun than the sun itself is wide. But Parker's been making passes closer and closer, faster and faster ever since. It's now the fastest object humans have ever made. It could get from London to Paris in 2 seconds. But funny enough, the scientists who made it don't actually like that.
>> And I don't like it. I would like it to slow down. I want Parker to spend as much time as possible very close to the sun, so we can get all the wealth of the data. >> The data suggests that our sun's corona is over a million degrees Celsius. How is the Parker Solar Probe not melting?
>> In some sense, this is not a real temperature. To actually feel the heat, you're going to need a lot more particles. >> Turns out that commonly cited number is sort of a lie. The charged particles that make up the corona are moving insanely fast. And how fast particles are moving is what we're really measuring when we say temperature. But lucky for Parker, there are very few of those particles. In fact, so few that the scientists who built Parker don't really care about these particles that
much. >> We are not worried about it. We can actually stick our instruments into that flow, and it doesn't do anything. >> The heat they do worry about is the same heat and energy that we use here on Earth, which comes from the light itself. >> The only thing that really hurts Parker is when the solar surface heat, like this big radiating lamp, can shine directly on on the sensitive parts.
>> Light, or more specifically photons, >> >> carries the sun's energy across the vacuum of space toward us. But this close, sunlight is hundreds of times more intense than it is on Earth. That's why Parker hides all of its scientific equipment behind this very thick heat shield.
>> They would do these demos on this carbon-carbon composite. You take a blowtorch, and you would hold it there as long as you wanted, and then ask everybody to touch the back of the darn thing. And the back was ice cold. >> >> As it flew through the corona, Parker recorded something incredible. Sounds coming from the sun. There were these chirping sounds
and this weird sound and these hissing sounds. But if you're thinking, "Hey, you can't hear things in space. There's no air." You're right. These sounds are actually electric and magnetic waves that scientists then converted into sound waves. They're the sounds of intense solar wind, from those same charged particles that the sun is constantly blasting out to create the heliosphere.
The whooshing sound comes from changes in the speed of that solar wind. The layered pitches represent changes in the temperature.
When it gets hotter, the pitch gets higher. And when there's a particularly big explosion, called a solar storm, everything gets louder. Those solar storms can get really dangerous for us on Earth. And scientists today say that we should be getting ready for a big one soon. In 1859, the sun released a large blast of particles that shot out and raced toward the Earth. It took under a day to travel
over 150 million kilometers and slam into our planet, causing the largest solar storm ever recorded. It resulted in dark red northern lights that could be seen as far as the tropics. Luckily, on Earth, life is protected by our own magnetic field. It deflects most of those charged particles. So, these storms don't affect life on Earth, but they do affect technology.
>> >> In 1967, it almost caused a nuclear war. >> Really? >> Yeah, so there was this huge storm. The US found its radars in, you know, northern Greenland jammed. They thought the Soviets had jammed them.
Fortunately, the US Air Force already had a solar physics group which could quickly say that no, no, no, no, put the planes back on and uh >> The sun goes through cycles of activity that last about 11 years. If the sun cycle is at the top of this graph, it basically means that it's throwing a tantrum. It's got flares and eruptions and storms, lots of charged particles coming at us. If it's at the bottom, it's basically napping. Today, we're about here, and we've been seeing visible signs of it.
>> Quite frightening, isn't it? >> That's one reason why studying the sun is so crucial, both for our future on Earth and for our future in space. Because on the moon or Mars, there's no strong magnetic field to hide behind. So, off-world, these storms could mean dangerous doses of radiation.
>> We're going to establish a moon base. We're going to put boots on Mars. I want to be able to tell them, "You can go on expedition X for for this many hours, days, and be able to say with confidence that they're going to be able to do that without risking their lives."
>> The Parker Solar Probe could only get here. But our ship is magically protected, so we're going deeper. >> >> As our ship approaches the surface, we notice something very weird. Wait. Why is it getting colder?
To go further, it's time to breach the surface of the sun. This is the photosphere. Particles here are moving slower, so it's actually a cooler temperature. Here, the temperature is 5,500° C, hot enough to boil diamonds. So, atoms are getting ripped apart into plasma.
And all around you >> is boiling and roiling bubbles of gas constantly moving. >> And we just got the most detailed look ever. These extreme close-ups were taken by the newest and most powerful solar ground telescope in the world. What's truly crazy is the scale in these images. You could fit the entire Earth right
here. In this photo, each of these bubbles is the size of France. And sometimes you might see >> >> a sunspot. Darker, cooler, and wider than our whole planet.
And in 1795, these sunspots led to a bit of confusion. So, one of the most famous astronomers at the time, Sir William Herschel, wrote this paper that said that sunspots might be openings that reveal the Sun has a solid surface that could be inhabited by the sun people.