Ah, the Sun.
So bright.
So hot.
Time to jump into your
super heat-resistant spaceship
and get so close you could touch it.
If you dare.
The Sun is so massive
that it accounts for 99.8%
of our Solar System’s total mass.
With a diameter
of 1.4 million km (870,000),
you could fit about
one million Earths inside of it.
It burns bright
due to the process of nuclear fusion.
Hydrogen atoms fuse to create helium
and it’s worked that way
for 4.5 billion years.
It’ll be another five billion years
before it burns through all of its hydrogen.
Then it will burn helium
and will start to swell.
Eventually it will swallow Mercury,
Venus and the Earth.
So you’d better touch it
before it touches you.
It’s time to head off
on your journey to the Sun.
Considering that big ball of gas
has such a massive gravitational pull,
it should be a pretty easy flight.
Right?
Well, this journey
is going to be more of an odyssey.
That’s because Earth
is traveling almost entirely sideways
relative to the Sun at a speed
of about 108,000 km/h (67,000 mph).
To get to the Sun,
you’d need to cancel out
that sideways motion.
And that would require a lot of energy.
About 55 times more energy
than it takes to travel to Mars.
Like the Parker Solar Probe,
your uber-ship is capable of speeds
reaching 163 km/s (101 mps),
but you're still going to have
plenty of time to prepare on the way.
After three years you’d arrive
at the Sun’s outermost layer,
the corona.
This layer, is located
7 to 10 million km (4 to 6 million mi)
above the Sun’s surface.
And big surprise,
it’s hot.
About 1 million °C (1.8 million °F).
That’s about 900 times hotter than lava.
You’d also be exposed
to massive amounts of radiation.
Make sure you slather on
copious amounts
of specially formulated sunscreen
that could shield you from everything
from ultraviolet light to gamma rays.
Without this,
you could get radiation sickness
leading to cancer,
then death.
Not the most ideal kind of sunbathing,
right?
Obviously, you should
wear sunglasses too.
Or better yet,
have a sunshield
in your heat-resistant spacesuit.
The Sun would be
tens of thousands of times brighter
here than it was back on Earth.
Traveling onward,
you’d reach the chromosphere.
Now you're 3,000 km (1,860 mi)
above the Sun’s surface.
Surprisingly, temperatures here
would take a big drop.
In the chromosphere,
they'd range from
3,700 to 7,700 °C (6,700 to 14,000 °F).
And unlike other layers,
it would get cooler
as you get closer to the Sun.
But look out.
Massive loops of plasma
could jet out toward you.
These are solar prominences.
And they are extremely hot.
Plus, they could be
ten times the diameter of Earth.
You’d now see how granulated
the surface of the Sun looks up close.
Below you would be bright expanses
as wide as Texas surrounded by narrow,
darker regions.
Next stop, the photosphere.
You’d have finally arrived
at the surface of the Sun.
As much as you’d like to land here
you couldn't.
That's because the Sun
has no actual surface.
It would be like stepping out onto a cloud.
A scorching, searing cloud.
The gravity would be so intense
that if you weighed 70 kg (154 lb)
back on Earth,
you’d now weigh
a whopping 1,800 kg (4,000 lb).
Outside of your ship,
that extra weight
would crush your bones and organs.
OK, pushing deeper from here,
you’d enter the convective zone.
Temperatures would now hit
2 million °C (3.6 million ° F).
That would be almost
400 times hotter than Earth's core.
The density here would be so intense
even light
would have a hard time escaping.
A little bit like in a black hole.
You'd be cooking in a soup
of densely packed solar particles,
blinded by their luminosity.
Finally, you’d make it to the core,
500,000 km (311,000 mi)
below the surface.
This is where the Sun’s
nuclear fusion occurs.
So what would happen now
if you reached out
and tried to touch the Sun?
This would be light-years
beyond sizzling.
You'd be almost instantly obliterated.
A cremation furnace
has temperatures of 1,000°C (1,800 °F).
That wouldn’t even compare
to the millions of degrees
you’d encounter down here.
And sorry to say
there is no material on Earth
that could withstand these temperatures
long enough for you to find out
what the Sun really feels like.
The closest we could get right now
is about
1.6 million km (1 million mi) away.
Probably should have mentioned that
at the start.
Now, you could stick around
and wait to find out
when the Sun swallows the Earth.
But that’s a story for another WHAT IF.