The Sun Is A Beast

Summer travel (hooray!) kept me from posting last week. While I was away, however, an amazing video of the Sun’s surface crossed my feed which I need you to spend just a few minutes contemplating.

I’m posting it here below this paragraph. Give it your full attention for a whole minute at least. Set a timer if necessary. Watch it play out more than once. You want to give yourself time to really see what’s moving and how, to notice small details and catch fine grained features. Go ahead… I’ll wait.

Ok. Excellent.

So what are you looking at?

That’s a close up of a small region of the Sun’s surface. “Small” here is relative. You could fit about 1 million Earth’s inside the Sun but the whole image here is about 1000 kilometers across (600 miles). That’s about a 10 hour drive. For reference, the Sun’s diameter is 800,000 miles which is a 600 day drive. So what you’re see in the movie above is like a postage stamp sized (relatively speaking) piece of the Sun’s surface.

And what’s happening on the surface? What is that weird hypnotic motion?

It’s boiling. The Sun is boiling.

The temperature at the Sun’s surface is about 5,500 degrees C (or 10,000 F). That’s 18 times hotter than a pizza oven. At these temperatures the matter making up the Sun is a plasma which means it’s a fluid… it flows. And the insane energies being generated inside the Sun are like a fire below a pot of water. The fire makes the water to boil. Have you ever watched water boil? If so you have a first cut at understanding what’s happening in the video.

All those little feathered features you see in the movie are plumes of superheated plasma rising up to the surface and then spreading out. Once they cool they get darken and sink back down.

So what you're looking at are vast city-sized flows of superheat gas swirling, rolling, rising and sinking. It’s an endless dance repeated across the face of the Sun that’s been going for more than 4 billion years.

Now let those images and their reality put your life into it’s proper (beautiful) Cosmic framing.