Without the sun, we’re nothing.
The haunting 2007 movie Sunshine explores what happens in an apocalyptic world where the sun is dying. A team of astronauts must venture out to revive the sun; the movie brilliantly portrays the sun’s scorching, searing presence.
You may wonder: just how hot is the sun?
The movie does a great, visceral portrayal, but what is the sun’s actual temperature? How hot is it that it can sustain life on Earth from an impossibly far distance? If you’re wondering how scientists have conceptualized the temperature of the sun, keep reading.
Facts About the Sun
Let’s first review some facts about the sun, with credit to NASA.
The sun is a yellow dwarf star around which the Earth revolves. It’s about 4.5 billion years old, and just 26,000 light-years away from us.
It’s the largest mass in our solar system, and its huge gravitational pull keeps the surrounding planets in orbit.
It is a star, meaning it is a glowing, scorching hot ball of hydrogen and helium. Because the core of the sun is so hot and pressurized, nuclear fusion takes place at the core. This reaction changing hydrogen into helium creates a ton of heat.
How much heat?
How Hot Is the Sun?
The very surface of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit or 5,600 Celsius.
Just like Earth, the hottest part of the Sun is its core. The temperature rises sharply the closer you get to the sun’s core.
At the core, it is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit or just about 15 million degrees Celsius.
Between the core and the outer atmospheric layers, the sun has a couple of other zones associated with different temperature ranges:
- Radiative zone (4 million °F/2 million °C – 12 million °F/7 million °C)
- Convection zone (4 million °F/2 million °C)
- Photosphere (10,500 °F/5,800 °C)
- Chromosphere (11,100 – 36,600 °F [6000 – 20,000°C])
The photosphere is the coolest layer of the sun.
The corona, the uppermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere, can also reach temperatures upwards of millions of degrees.
How We Feel Heat
Now, how hot is that?
Why is it that once it gets dark after sunset, we no longer feel the heat of the sun?
This is because the heat we feel on Earth isn’t the direct heat from the Sun. It’s actually heat created by the Sun’s light.
What does this mean?
The Sun emits light that travels through space toward us. There isn’t much between us and the Sun for this light to run into, so once the light hits the Earth, this light (carrying energy) is absorbed and heat is emitted.
This is why temperatures cool down when there are clouds. The clouds are a major layer of obstruction between the surface of Earth and the sun’s rays, and they absorb a lot of the light (and thus heat).
On a sunny day, the light encounters atoms on our skin’s surface, exciting them and causing us to feel hot.
More Sun Facts
The Sun is amazing. If you think about it, it’s just a ball of insane heat out there in endless space. It’s actually pretty modest as stars go, but we completely depend on it.
How hot is the sun? Extremely hot!
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