The Sun is a huge ball of hydrogen and helium held together by its own gravity. The Sun has several regions. The interior regions include the core, the radiative zone, and the convection zone.
Answer: The Sun does not "burn", like we think of logs in a fire or paper burning. The Sun glows because it is a very big ball of gas, and a process called nuclear fusion is taking place in its core.
The Sun is our nearest star. It is, as all stars are, a hot ball of gas made up mostly of Hydrogen. The Sun is so hot that most of the gas is actually plasma, the fourth state of matter.
The heat and light spreads out from the centre of the ball of gas toward the edges, and that's what makes the Sun glow. So there is no normal “flame” in the Sun – at least not like the flames we have in a fire here on Earth – because the energy and light and heat is coming from the nuclear reaction.
A: Hydrogen and helium are by far the most abundant elements found in the Sun, making up about 98 percent of its mass, but other, heavier elements play an important role in the physical processes that occur in the Sun.
The Sun is a huge, glowing sphere of hot gas. Most of this gas is hydrogen (about 70%) and helium (about 28%). Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen make up 1.5% and the other 0.5% is made up of small amounts of many other elements such as neon, iron, silicon, magnesium and sulfur.
The temperature in the Sun's core is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius) – hot enough to sustain nuclear fusion.
Eventually, the fuel of the sun - hydrogen - will run out. When this happens, the sun will begin to die. But don't worry, this should not happen for about 5 billion years. After the hydrogen runs out, there will be a period of 2-3 billion years whereby the sun will go through the phases of star death.
But the burning of the sun is not a chemical combustion, it is a nuclear fusion. The sun is considered as the giant hydrogen bomb. In the nuclear fusion, the nuclei of the atoms fused with each other to form a larger nuclei. The nuclear fusion does not involve oxygen.
Since the amount of melanin you can produce is determined by genetics, some people are more prone to burn, while others tan. Although any skin tone can burn, people with naturally darker skin are less likely to do so.
Stars like our Sun burn for about nine or 10 billion years. So our Sun is about halfway through its life. But don't worry. It still has about 5,000,000,000—five billion—years to go.
It is a common misconception that the Sun is yellow, or orange or even red. However, the Sun is essentially all colors mixed together, which appear to our eyes as white. This is easy to see in pictures taken from space. Rainbows are light from the Sun, separated into its colors.
While the Sun is not getting hotter, the amount of radiation being trapped in Earth's atmosphere is increasing due to the burning of fossil fuels. When heat can't escape Earth's atmosphere, changes to Earth's energy budget causes rapid climate change, at a rate in which biological life has trouble adapting.
Astronomers estimate that the sun has about 7 billion to 8 billion years left before it sputters out and dies.
The efficiency of thermonuclear fusion is a major reason the sun has kept radiating heat for so long—the energy released by turning just one kilogram of hydrogen into helium is the same as burning 20,000 metric tons of coal.
A down-to-Earth experiment solves an astronomical mystery
Now, a ground-based experiment has revealed why this life-giving molecule is so rare in the cosmos: because oxygen atoms cling tightly to stardust, preventing them from joining together to form oxygen molecules.
With no sunlight, photosynthesis would stop, but that would only kill some of the plants—there are some larger trees that can survive for decades without it. Within a few days, however, the temperatures would begin to drop, and any humans left on the planet's surface would die soon after.
The sun is a bolus of gas and fire measuring around 27 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core and 10,000 degrees at its surface. Meanwhile, the cosmic background temperature—the temperature of space once you get far enough away to escape Earth's balmy atmosphere—hovers at -455 F.
Fires can't start in space itself because there is no oxygen – or indeed anything else – in a vacuum. Yet inside the confines of spacecraft, and freed from gravity, flames behave in strange and beautiful ways. They burn at cooler temperatures, in unfamiliar shapes and are powered by unusual chemistry.
“In this process of the sun becoming a red giant, it's likely going to obliterate the inner planets … likely Mercury and Venus will be destroyed,” Blackman said. Earth may survive the event, but will not be habitable. Once the sun completely runs out fuel, it will contract into a cold corpse of a star – a white dwarf.
After the Sun exhausts the hydrogen in its core, it will balloon into a red giant, consuming Venus and Mercury. Earth will become a scorched, lifeless rock — stripped of its atmosphere, its oceans boiled off. Astronomers aren't sure exactly how close the Sun's outer atmosphere will come to Earth.
The hottest thing in the Universe (Supernova)
Supernovas are the hottest thing in the Universe as they reach a million degrees Celsius. These explosive events occur when a star between 8 and 40 times more massive than our Sun reaches the end of its stellar lifecycle and explodes when its core collapses. What is this?
By zapping a piece of aluminum with the world's most powerful x-ray laser, physicists have heated matter to 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius)—making it briefly the hottest thing on Earth. Only locations such as the heart of the sun or the center of a nuclear explosion are hotter.
At the bottom of the plates, around 60 miles (100 kilometers) deep, the temperature is about 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit (1,300 degrees Celsius). By the time you get to the boundary between the mantle and the outer core, which is 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) down, the temperature is nearly 5,000 F (2,700 C).