What’s that bright thing in the sky? Is it a blazing chariot?
An all-seeing eye? Maybe a burning ball of gas?
At different points in history, humans have believed the sun to be all of these things.
They may not have agreed on what the sun was,
but ancient cultures recognized its power to sustain life,
so it was appropriately held in a place of honor in most mythologies.
Whether people thought it was a divine being or a nuclear fusion factory, which we now
know to be the case, the stories all had one lesson in common: don’t look directly at it.
Energy from the sun gives heat, offers a bright reprieve from the darkness of night,
and serves as the base for our entire food chain.
Basically, the sun is central to so many myths
because it provides all the energy we need to live. But it makes you wonder.
Where does all that energy even come from?
Well, let’s have fellow astronomer Matt O’Dowd from PBS Digital’s Space Time
explain a little about the source of the sun’s power.
The Sun is a gigantic nuclear reactor, as is every star.
And I do mean gigantic. It's the same as every nuclear bomb on the planet went off
roughly 20 million times every second. It's been doing that for 5 billion years so far,
with another 5 billion to go. The secret to this incredible energy production
comes from the most famous equation of all time:
Einstein's E = mc².
This tells us that mass is just another form of energy
and that every little bit of mass contains an enormous amount of energy.
And that's the type of energy released in the center of the Sun.
The tiny nuclei of the tiniest atom - hydrogen - are smashed together at incredible speeds,
allowing them to overcome their natural repulsion
and stick together due to the strong nuclear force.
The result is a nucleus of helium plus a LOT of energy. This is a bit of stellar alchemy:
the elements of the periodic table are forged in the hearts of stars,
although most of the interesting ones get made by stars much bigger than our sun,
before being blasted out in supernova explosions.
The energy produced in these fusion reactions takes the form of
gamma ray light. This light slowly makes its way out of the super-dense interior of the Sun.
It takes 10s of thousands of years for each photon of light
to bounce its way out. And then takes about eight minutes to reach the earth
once it escapes. So the warmth you feel on your face when you step out
into a summer day was actually produced in the core of the Sun
before the dawn of human civilization.
And since that dawn, cultures have been worshiping the sun
and its light as a powerful deity.
Think about it. The world seems to come alive when the sun is in the sky,
and its reliable return every day provides a sense of order to the universe.
Of course, when ancient Indian cultures in the Vedic period about 3000 years
ago looked at the Sun, they knew nothing about the strong nuclear force. Instead,
they saw the highest representation of Agni, the Vedic god of fire.
Often depicted with two heads and riding a ram,
Agni was one of the most powerful Vedic gods, second only to Indra, the god of the heavens.
In the other levels of his power, Agni existed on Earth as regular fire and in
the sky as lightning. In his triumvirate form, he came to represent the connection
between the mundane and the divine.
Just like the fire and sun he personified, Agni was feared as an agent of destruction,
but also revered for his ability to nourish.
But Agni wasn’t always pleased by his association with destruction.
In one story from the Vedas, a demon asked Agni
to confirm his rightful betrothal to Puloma, wife of the sage Bhrigu.
It was a complicated situation, and Agni could neither confirm nor deny the demon’s claim,
so the demon stole Puloma away.
She made it back okay, but Bhrigu still cursed Agni to devour and destroy
everything in his path. Enraged, Agni protested by withdrawing all of his fire from the world,
including the fire that humans used to sacrifice to the gods.
Obviously, this would not do, so Brahma, the supreme creator of the universe,
altered the curse so that Agni’s fire would purify everything he touched.
Agni isn’t the oldest solar deity — it’s likely impossible to know who that first one was.
The Vedic culture was just one of many who devoted a lot of time, energy,
and resources to worshiping the sun.
The Incas who lived in modern day Peru from the 12th to 16th centuries
incorporated the Sun in so many aspects of their culture,
from holidays to agriculture to politics.
Their sun god, Inti, was one of their most powerful deities, again,
second only to his father, the creator god Viracocha.
The Incan royal family was said to be directly descended from Inti,
so his temples were the most grand.
The Temple of the Sun in the capital city Cuzco
was made of ornately carved stone and filled with extravagant gold objects,
all of which was plundered when the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire in the 1500s.
Inti was honored every year with a week-long festival called Inti Raymi.
The festival includes fasting, sacrificing scores of animals,
parading decorated statues of Inti, and of course singing and dancing.
It’s a party, after all, but it was also meant as an appeal to Inti.
The festival, which is still held today,
happens In June, around the southern hemisphere’s winter solstice.
In their celebration they were begging Inti to return to them in the darkest time of year
Of course, not all solar deities were depicted as male.
In Japanese shinto religion, Amaterasu is considered
the most powerful kami, or divine spirit.
She is the ruler of the Takama no Hara, the high celestial plain where all the kami live.
Born from the left eye of her father Izanagi as he purified himself in a stream,
Amaterasu is also said to be the ancestor of the Japanese ruling family.
In one myth, Amaterasu hides in a cave after the storm god Susanoo
pulls some distasteful younger brother shenanigans.
Without Amaterasu’s warming light, the world
fell into decay and evil spirits roamed the Earth.
The other kami tried everything they could think of to draw Amaterasu out of the cave,
from using roosters to trick her into thinking it was dawn to bribing her with sparkly jewels.
She was eventually lured out of hiding by the kamis’ raucous
laughter as they watched the goddess Amenouzume perform a naughty dance.
In Baltic mythology, the sun was represented by Saule, the mother and ruler of the heavenly beings
who determined the well-being of all life on earth.
Depicted as a blond woman wearing a golden shawl and crown,
Saule lived in a palace at the end of the sea, where she tended a garden of golden apples.
According to legend, Saule in her divine radiance would ride across the sky in a chariot pulled by
two tireless white horses who didn’t sweat. Her daughters were the planets
and her husband was the moon. Though in some stories, Saule and the moon are divorced
because he decided to pursue the goddess of dawn, aka the morning star or the planet Venus.
Saule was far from the only solar deity to ride a vehicle across the sky. The Greek gods Helios
and Apollo were both shown riding a chariot through the heavens.
The Egyptian sun god Ra was said to ride in a solar barge
during the day. At night, he sailed through the underworld until he returned to the sky in the
east. Cave carvings from the neolithic and bronze ages depicting the Sun on
a ship passing through stars show that the concept of a solar barge has existed for millennia.
Given how important the sun was to these ancient cultures,
it’s no surprise that a solar eclipse, a phenomenon where the moon
blocks the light of the Sun from our earthly view,
would be a dramatic and meaningful event. As Ra passed through the Egyptian
underworld in his boat, the evil god Apep would try to devour him.
Eclipses happened when he succeeded,
but Ra always managed to escape.
Plenty of other cultures explained eclipses as something eating the sun.
In Vietnamese mythology, that creature is a frog or toad.
In ancient China, it was a dragon. In Hindu mythology,
the god Rahu was beheaded, and he swallowed the sun
as his severed head flew through the air. In various parts of the world,
including parts of China, South America, and even at the Griffith Observatory in LA,
it’s customary to make loud noises like banging pots and pans
to scare away the animal or demon trying to eat or steal the sun during an eclipse.
But to the Fon people of modern day Benin, a solar eclipse was cause to celebrate, not fear.
Also known as the Dahomey, the Fon believed that a supreme being named
Nana Buluku created the universe and gave birth to Mawu and Lisa.
Mawu created the Earth with the help of a great snake and then invited her brother Lisa
to help her populate it with their children: gods, goddesses, plants, animals, and humans.
The humans treated poor Mawu so terribly that she fled to the sky and inhabited the moon.
But, she took pity on them and sent her brother/baby daddy Lisa
to teach the humans how to build shelter, use tools, and farm. When he was done,
he went up to the sky and inhabited the sun to be close to his sister/wife.
When Mawu first went to visit Lisa, she blocked his sunlight,
but it was okay because the fruit of that union… was literal fruit.
They were the seeds that humans needed to plant once they mastered farming.
And now when there’s a solar eclipse,
the Fon who hold onto the old ways hope there might be another gift from above.
From fiery gods of destruction to sweet life givers who farm apples and protect
orphans, the sun has been a central figure in some of the world’s most enduring myths.
That’s because, as humans, there would be no life without that nuclear force in the sky.
I guess that makes it pretty important… but in the grand scheme of things,
it’s still just a boring, middle-aged G-type star.
To learn just how not-special the sun is,
check out our collab episode with PBS Space Time
about galactic habitable zones,
featuring your other favorite astrophysicist host: Matt O’Dowd.
I’ll also be there to answer the question: if there are aliens in the Milky Way,
where should they be?
While you’re there, be sure to check out the other episodes.
Space Time explores the outer reaches of space, the craziness of astrophysics,
and the possibilities of sci-fi, and anything else you can think of beyond Planet Earth.