ASTRONOMY
Chapter 08: THE SUN
FIGURE 15.1
Our Star. The Sun—our local star—is quite average in many ways. However, that does not stop it
from being a fascinating object to study. From solar flares and coronal mass ejections, like the one
seen coming from the Sun in the top right of this image, the Sun is a highly dynamic body at the
center of our solar system. This image combines two separate satellite pictures of the Sun—the
inner one from the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the outer one from the Solar and Heliospheric
Observatory. (credit: modification of work by ESA/NASA)
Objectives
● Explain how the composition of the Sun differs from that of Earth
● Describe the various layers of the Sun and their functions
● Explain what happens in the different parts of the Sun’s
atmosphere
● Describe the sunspot cycle and, more generally, the solar cycle
● Explain what space weather is and how it affects Earth
● Trace the nuclear reactions in the solar interior
Structure and the composition of the Sun
● The Sun, like all stars, is an enormous ball of extremely hot, largely ionized gas, shining under
its own power.
● The Sun could fit 109 Earths side-by-side across its diameter, and it has enough volume to
hold about 1.3 million Earths.
● The Sun does not have a solid surface or continents like Earth, nor does it have a solid
core(Fig: 15.2)
Figure 15.2 : Earth and the Sun. Here, Earth is
shown to scale with part of the Sun and a giant loop
of hot gas erupting from its surface. The inset shows
the entire Sun, smaller. (credit: modification of work
by SOHO/EIT/ESA)
Characteristics of the Sun
Composition of the Sun
FIGURE 15.3
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979). Her 1925 doctoral thesis laid the foundations
for understanding the composition of the Sun and the stars. Yet, being a woman, she
was not given a formal appointment at Harvard, where she worked, until 1938 and was
not appointed a professor until 1956. (credit: Smithsonian Institution)
● Most of the elements found in the Sun are in the form of
atoms, with a small number of molecules, all in the form of
gases: the Sun is so hot that no matter can survive as a liquid
or a solid.
● Sun is so hot that many of the atoms in it are ionized, that is,
stripped of one or more of their electrons.
● This removal of electrons from their atoms means that there is
a large quantity of free electrons and positively charged ions in
the Sun, making it an electrically charged environment (a hot
ionized gas a plasma).
● In the nineteenth century, scientists observed a spectral line at 530.3 nanometers
in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona.
● This line had never been seen before, and so it was assumed that this line was
the result of a new element found in the corona, quickly named coronium.
● later that astronomers discovered that this emission was in fact due to highly
ionized iron—iron with 13 of its electrons stripped off.
● This is how we first discovered that the Sun’s atmosphere had a temperature of
more than a million degrees.
The Layers of the Sun beneath the Visible Surface
Fig 15.4: Parts of the Sun. This illustration shows the different parts of the Sun, from the hot core
where the energy is generated through regions where energy is transported outward, first by
radiation, then by convection, and then out through the solar atmosphere. The parts of the
atmosphere are also labeled the photosphere, chromosphere, and corona. Some typical features
in the atmosphere are shown, such as coronal holes and prominences. (credit: modification of
work by NASA/Goddard)
Layers
● The core is approximately 20% of the size of the solar interior and
is thought to have a temperature of approximately 15 million K,
making it the hottest part of the Sun.
● Above the core is a region known as the radiative zone—named
for the primary mode of transporting energy across it.
● The convective zone is the outermost layer of the solar interior. It
is a thick layer approximately 200,000 kilometers deep that
transports energy from the edge of the radiative zone to the
surface through giant convection cells.
Photosphere
● The photosphere is the layer where the Sun becomes opaque and marks the
boundary past which we cannot see.
● solar atmosphere changes from almost perfectly transparent to almost completely
opaque in a distance of just over 400 kilometers; it is this thin region that we call the
photosphere.
Fig 15.5 :Solar Photosphere plus Sunspots. This photograph shows the photosphere—the
visible surface of the Sun. Also shown is an enlarged image of a group of sunspots; the size of
Earth is shown for comparison. Sunspots appear darker because they are cooler than their
surroundings. The typical temperature at the center of a large sunspot is about 3800 K, whereas
the photosphere has a temperature of about 5800 K. (credit: modification of work by NASA/SDO)
FIGURE 15.6
Granulation Pattern. The surface markings of the convection cells create a granulation pattern on
this dramatic image (left) taken from the Japanese Hinode spacecraft. You can see the same pattern
when you heat up miso soup. The right image shows an irregular-shaped sunspot and granules on
the Sun’s surface, seen with the Swedish Solar Telescope on August 22, 2003. (credit left:
modification of work by Hinode JAXA/NASA/PPARC; credit right: ISP/SST/Oddbjorn Engvold, Jun
Elin Wiik, Luc Rouppe van der Voort)
Cromosphere
● The region of the Sun’s atmosphere that lies immediately above the photosphere is called the chromosphere.
● The chromosphere was visible only when the photosphere was concealed by the Moon during a total solar
eclipse.
FIGURE 15.7
The Sun’s Atmosphere. Composite image showing the three components of the solar atmosphere: the
photosphere or surface of the Sun taken in ordinary light; the chromosphere, imaged in the light of the strong red
spectral line of hydrogen (H-alpha); and the corona as seen with X-rays. (credit: modification of work by NASA)
Cromosphere
● Observations made during eclipses show that the chromosphere is about
2000 to 3000 kilometers thick.
● Its spectrum consists of bright emission lines, indicating that this layer is
composed of hot gases emitting light at discrete wavelengths.
● observations of the chromospheric spectrum revealed a yellow emission
line (He).
● Chromosphere is hotter (10,000 K) than the photosphere.
FIGURE 15.8:Temperatures in the Solar Transition region and Corona
Atmosphere. On this graph, temperature
is shown increasing upward, and height
above the photosphere is shown
increasing to the right. Note the very
rapid increase in temperature over a very
short distance in the transition region
between the chromosphere and the
corona.
In 2013, NASA launched the Interface Region Imaging
Spectrograph (IRIS) to study the transition region to
understand better how and why this sharp temperature
increase occurs. IRIS is the first space mission that is
able to obtain high spatial resolution images of the
different features produced over this wide temperature
range and to see how they change with time and location
(Figure 15.9).
FIGURE 15.9
Portion of the Transition Region. This image shows a giant ribbon of relatively cool gas threading through the lower
portion of the hot corona. This ribbon (the technical term is filament) is made up of many individual threads. Time-lapse
movies of this filament showed that it gradually heated as it moved through the corona. Scientists study events like this in
order to try to understand what heats the chromosphere and corona to high temperatures. The “whiskers” at the edge of
the Sun are spicules, jets of gas that shoot material up from the Sun’s surface and disappear after only a few minutes.
This single image gives a hint of just how complicated it is to construct a model of the all the different structures and
heating mechanisms in the solar atmosphere. (credit: JAXA/NASA/Hinode)
The Corona
● The outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere is called the corona.
● Like the chromosphere, the corona was first observed during total
eclipses (fig 15.10)
● The corona extends millions of kilometers above the photosphere
and emits about half as much light as the full moon.
● The corona extends so far into space—far past Earth—that here on
our planet, we are technically living in the Sun’s atmosphere.
FIGURE 15.10
Coronagraph. This image of the Sun was taken March 2, 2016. The larger dark circle
in the center is the disk the blocks the Sun’s glare, allowing us to see the corona. The
smaller inner circle is where the Sun would be if it were visible in this image. (credit:
modification of work by NASA/SOHO)
Coronal Hole: Large dark regions of the corona that are relatively cool and quiet are called coronal
holes (Figure 15.11).
FIGURE 15.11The dark area visible near the Sun’s south pole on this Solar Dynamics
Observer spacecraft image is a coronal hole. (credit: modification of work by NASA/SDO)
The solar Wind
● One of the most remarkable discoveries about the Sun’s atmosphere is
that it produces a stream of charged particles (mainly protons and
electrons) that we call the solar wind.
● The solar wind exists because the gases in the corona are so hot and
moving so rapidly that they cannot be held back by solar gravity.
● The solar wind comes predominantly from coronal holes, where gas can
stream away from the Sun into space unhindered by magnetic fields.
Solar wind
● At the surface of Earth, we are protected to some degree from
the solar wind by our atmosphere and Earth’s magnetic field.
● However, the magnetic field lines come into Earth at the north
and south magnetic poles.
● Charged particles accelerated by the solar wind can follow the
field down into our atmosphere.
● As the particles strike molecules of air, they cause them to
glow, producing beautiful curtains of light called the auroras,
or the northern and southern lights (Figure 15.12).
FIGURE 15.12
Aurora. The colorful glow in the sky results from charged particles in a solar wind
interacting with Earth’s magnetic fields. The stunning display captured here occurred
over Jokulsarlon Lake in Iceland in 2013. (credit: Moyan Brenn)
Solar Cycle - Sunspots
● The first evidence that the Sun changes came from studies of
sunspots, which are large, dark features seen on the surface of the
Sun caused by increased magnetic activity.
● They look darker because the spots are typically at a temperature of
about 3800 K, whereas the bright regions that surround them are at
about 5800 K (Figure 15.13).
● Occasionally, these spots are large enough to be visible to the unaided
eye.
● Many spots become much larger than Earth, and a few, like the largest
one shown in Figure 15.13, have reached diameters over 140,000
kilometers.
● By recording the apparent motions of the sunspots as the turning Sun
carried them across its disk (Figure 15.14), Galileo, in 1612,
demonstrated that the Sun rotates on its axis with a rotation period of
approximately 1 month.
● Modern observations show that the speed of rotation of the Sun varies
according to latitude, that is, it’s different as you go north or south of the
Sun’s equator. The rotation period is about 25 days at the equator, 28
days at latitude 40°, and 36 days at latitude 80°. We call this behavior
differential rotation.
FIGURE 15.13
Sunspots. This image of sunspots, cooler and thus darker regions on the Sun, was taken in July 2012.
You can see the dark, central region of each sunspot (called the umbra) surrounded by a less dark region
(the penumbra). The largest spot shown here is about 11 Earths wide. Although sunspots appear dark
when seen next to the hotter gases of the photosphere, an average sunspot, cut out of the solar surface
and left standing in the night sky, would be about as bright as the full moon. The mottled appearance of
the Sun’s surface is granulation. (credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Alan Friedman)
Rotation period of Sun
● By recording the apparent motions of the sunspots as the turning Sun carried
them across its disk (Figure 15.14), Galileo, in 1612, demonstrated that the
Sun rotates on its axis with a rotation period of approximately 1 month.
● Modern observations show that the speed of rotation of the Sun varies
according to latitude, that is, it’s different as you go north or south of the Sun’s
equator.
● The rotation period is about 25 days at the equator, 28 days at latitude 40°,
and 36 days at latitude 80°. We call this behavior differential rotation.
FIGURE 15.14
Sunspots Rotate Across Sun’s Surface. This sequence of photographs of the Sun’s
surface tracks the movement of sunspots across the visible hemisphere of the Sun. On
March 30, 2001, this group of sunspots extended across an area about 13 times the
diameter of Earth. This region produced many flares and coronal mass ejections.
(credit: modification of work by SOHO/NASA/ESA)
Sunspot cycle
● Between 1826 and 1850, Heinrich Schwabe, a German pharmacist and amateur astronomer, found
that the number of sunspots varied systematically, in cycles about a decade long. - sunspot cycle
● He observed that the total number visible on the Sun at any one time was likely to be very much
greater at certain times—the periods of sunspot maximum—than at other times—the periods of
sunspot minimum.
● We now know that sunspot maxima occur at an average interval of 11 years, but the intervals
between successive maxima have ranged from as short as 9 years to as long as 14 years.
● During sunspot maxima, more than 100 spots can often be seen at once. Even then, less than
one-half of one percent of the Sun’s surface is covered by spots (Figure 15.22).
● During sunspot minima, sometimes no spots are visible.
● The Sun’s activity reached its most recent maximum in 2014.
Magnetism and Solar Cycle
● Astronomers now understand that it is the Sun’s changing magnetic field
that drives solar activity.
● The solar magnetic field is measured using a property of atoms called the
Zeeman effect (This splitting of lines in the presence of a magnetic field ).
● Measurements of the Zeeman effect in the spectra of the light from
sunspot regions show them to have strong magnetic fields (Figure
15.15).
FIGURE 15.15
Zeeman Effect. These photographs show how magnetic fields in sunspots are
measured by means of the Zeeman effect. (left) The vertical black line indicates the
position of the spectrograph slit through which light is passed to obtain the spectrum in
(right). (credit: modification of work by NSO/AURA/NSF)
FIGURE 15.16: A visual representation of the Sun’s magnetic fields, called a magnetogram, can be used to see the
relationship between sunspots and the Sun’s magnetic field
Magnetogram and Solar Cycle. In the image on the left, called a magnetogram, we see the magnetic polarity of sunspots. The black areas are
where the magnetism is pointing toward the Sun’s core, whereas the white regions are where it is pointing away from the core, toward us. This
dramatic sequence on the right shows the activity cycle of the Sun. The 10 maps of the magnetic field on the surface of the Sun span a period of 7.5
years. The two magnetic polarities (N and S) of the magnetic field are shown against a blue disk as dark blue to black (N) and as light blue to white
(S). The earliest image, taken on January 8, 1992, is at the lower left and was taken just after solar maximum. Each image, from left to right around
the arc, was taken one-half to one year after the preceding one. The last image was taken on July 25, 1999, as the Sun was approaching the next
solar maximum. Note a few striking patterns in the magnetic maps: the direction from white to black polarity in the Southern Hemisphere is opposite
from that in the Northern Hemisphere. (credit left: modification of work by NASA/SDO; credit right: modification of work by NASA/SOHO)
FIGURE 15.17
Magnetic Field Lines Wind Up. Because the Sun spins faster at the equator than near
the poles, the magnetic fields in the Sun tend to wind up as shown, and after a while
make loops. This is an idealized diagram; the real situation is much more complex.
FIGURE 15.18
Plages on the Sun. This image of the Sun was taken with a filter that transmits only
the light of the spectral line produced by singly ionized calcium. The bright cloud-like
regions are the plages. (credit: modification of work by NASA)
FIGURE 15.19
Prominences.
(a) This image of an eruptive prominence was taken in the light of singly ionized helium in the extreme ultraviolet part of the spectrum. The
prominence is a particularly large one. An image of Earth is shown at the same scale for comparison.
(b) A prominence is a huge cloud of relatively cool (about 60,000 K in this case), fairly dense gas suspended in the much hotter corona.
These pictures, taken in ultraviolet, are color coded so that white corresponds to the hottest temperatures and dark red to cooler ones.
The four images were taken, moving clockwise from the upper left, on May 15, 2001; March 28, 2000; January 18, 2000; and February
2, 2001. (credit a: modification of work by NASA/SOHO; credit b: modification of work by NASA/SDO)
FIGURE 15.20
Solar Flare. The bright white area seen on the right side of the Sun in this image from
the Solar Dynamics Observer spacecraft is a solar flare that was observed on June 25,
2015. (credit: NASA/SDO)
FIGURE 15.21
Flare and Coronal Mass Ejection. This sequence of four images shows the evolution over time of a giant eruption
on the Sun. (a) The event began at the location of a sunspot group, and (b) a flare is seen in far-ultraviolet light. (c)
Fourteen hours later, a CME is seen blasting out into space. (d) Three hours later, this CME has expanded to form a
giant cloud of particles escaping from the Sun and is beginning the journey out into the solar system. The white circle
in (c) and (d) shows the diameter of the solar photosphere. The larger dark area shows where light from the Sun has
been blocked out by a specially designed instrument to make it possible to see the faint emission from the corona.
(credit a, b, c, d: modification of work by SOHO/EIT, SOHO/LASCO, SOHO/MDI (ESA & NASA))
FIGURE 15.22
Solar Cycle. This dramatic sequence of images taken from the SOHO satellite over a period of 11
years shows how active regions change during the solar cycle. The images were taken in the
ultraviolet region of the spectrum and show that active regions on the Sun increase and decrease
during the cycle. Sunspots are located in the cooler photosphere, beneath the hot gases shown in
this image, and vary in phase with the emission from these hot gases—more sunspots and more
emission from hot gases occur together. (credit: modification of work by ESA/NASA/SOHO)
FIGURE 15.23
Solar Active Region Observed at Different Heights in the Sun’s Atmosphere. These four images of a solar flare on
October 22, 2012, show from the left: light from the Sun at a wavelength of 171 angstroms, which shows the structure
of loops of solar material in the corona; ultraviolet at 304 angstroms, which shows light from the region of the Sun’s
atmosphere where flares originate; light at 335 angstroms, which highlights radiation from active regions in the corona;
a magnetogram, which shows magnetically active regions on the Sun. Note how these different types of activity all
occur above a sunspot region with a strong magnetic field. (credit: modification of work by NASA/SDO/Goddard)
Space weather : reading assignment (section 15.4)
● With thousands of satellites in orbit, astronauts taking up
long-term residence in the International Space Station, millions of
people using cell phones, GPS, and wireless communication, and
nearly everyone relying on the availability of dependable electrical
power.
● Governments are now making major investments in trying to learn
how to predict when solar storms will occur and how strongly they
will affect Earth.
● Three solar phenomena—coronal holes, solar flares, and
CMEs—account for most of the space weather we experience.
FIGURE 15.24
International Space Station. The International Space Station is see above Earth, as
photographed in 2010 by the departing crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. (credit:
NASA)
FIGURE 15.25
NOAA Space Weather Prediction Operations Center. Bill Murtagh, a space weather
forecaster, leads a workshop on preparedness for events like geomagnetic storms.
(credit: modification of work by FEMA/Jerry DeFelice)
FIGURE 15.26
Numbers of Sunspots over Time. This diagram shows how the number of sunspots
has changed with time since counts of the numbers of spots began to be recorded on a
consistent scale. Note the low number of spots during the early years of the nineteenth
century, the Little Maunder Minimum. (credit: modification of work by NASA/ARC)
FIGURE 16.1
The Sun. It takes an incredible amount of energy for the Sun to shine, as it has and will
continue to do for billions of years. (credit: modification of work by Ed Dunens)
FIGURE 16.5
Fusion and Fission.
(a) In fusion, light atomic nuclei join together to form a heavier nuclei, releasing energy in the
process.
(b) In fission, energy is produced by the breaking up of heavy, complex nuclei into lighter ones.
Nuclear reaction in Sun’s interior
● Deep inside the Sun, a three-step process takes four hydrogen nuclei
and fuses them together to form a single helium nucleus.
● The helium nucleus is slightly less massive than the four hydrogen nuclei
that combine to form it, and that mass is converted into energy.
● The initial step required to form one helium nucleus from four hydrogen
nuclei is shown in Figure 16.6.
● At the high temperatures inside the Sun’s core, two protons combine to make a
deuterium nucleus, which is an isotope (or version) of hydrogen that contains one
proton and one neutron.
FIGURE 16.6
Proton-Proton Chain, Step 1. This is the first step in the process of fusing hydrogen into helium in the
Sun. High temperatures are required because this reaction starts with two hydrogen nuclei, which are
protons (shown in blue at left) that must overcome electrical repulsion to combine, forming a hydrogen
nucleus with a proton and a neutron (shown in red). Note that hydrogen containing one proton and one
neutron is given its own name: deuterium. Also produced in this reaction are a positron, which is an
antielectron, and an elusive particle named the neutrino.
FIGURE 16.7
Proton-Proton Chain, Step 2. This is the second step of the proton-proton chain, the fusion
reaction that converts hydrogen into helium in the Sun. This step combines one hydrogen
nucleus, which is a proton (shown in blue), with the deuterium nucleus from the previous
step (shown as a red and blue particle). The product of this is an isotope of helium with two
protons (blue) and one neutron (red) and energy in the form of gamma-ray radiation.
FIGURE 16.8
Proton-Proton Chain, Step 3. This is the third step in the fusion of hydrogen into
helium in the Sun. Note that the two helium-3 nuclei from the second step (see Figure
16.7) must combine before the third step becomes possible. The two protons that come
out of this step have the energy to collide with other protons in the Sun and start step
one again.
The Proton-Proton Chain
We can compute the amount of energy these reactions generate by calculating the difference in the initial and final
masses.
The masses of hydrogen and helium atoms in the units normally used by scientists are 1.007825 u and 4.00268 u,
respectively.
The mass lost, 0.02862 u, is 0.71% of the mass of the initial hydrogen.
If 1 kilogram of hydrogen is converted into helium, then the mass of the helium is only 0.9929 kilogram, and 0.0071
kilogram of material is converted into energy.
This amount, the energy released when a single kilogram (2.2 pounds) of hydrogen undergoes fusion, would
supply all the electricity used by the typical U.S. household for roughly 17,000 years.
● To produce the Sun’s luminosity of 4 × 1026 watts, some 600 million tons of hydrogen must be converted into
helium each second, of which about 4 million tons are converted from matter into energy.
● As large as these numbers are, the store of hydrogen (and thus of nuclear energy) in the Sun is still more
enormous, and can last a long time—billions of years.
● At the temperatures inside the stars with masses smaller than about 1.2 times the mass of our Sun (a
category that includes the Sun itself), most of the energy is produced by the reactions we have just described,
and this set of reactions is called the proton-proton chain (or sometimes, the p-p chain).
● In hotter stars, another set of reactions, called the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) cycle, accomplishes the
same net result.
● In the CNO cycle, carbon and hydrogen nuclei collide to initiate a series of reactions that form nitrogen,
oxygen, and ultimately, helium. The
CNO cycle
CNO cycle and P-P Chain