If we restrict ourselves to the core, even to the innermost, hottest region of the core, we're still talking about enormous volumes of space, and that makes all the difference.ĭespite things like flares, coronal mass ejections, sunspots, and other complex physics occurring in. Yes, there's an enormous amount of energy being emitted, but the Sun is huge. Neither energy nor energy-per-unit-time can successfully explain why atomic bombs can reach higher temperatures than the Sun's core.īut there is a physical explanation, and the way to see it for yourself is to think about the volume of the Sun. It's not even about power, or the energy released in a given amount of time the Sun has the atomic bomb beaten by a wide margin in that metric as well. With such enormous differences in energy, it might seem like a mistake to conclude that an atomic bomb's temperature is many times higher than the center of the Sun. When our Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel in the core, it will contract and heat up to a sufficient degree that helium fusion can begin.
As time goes on, the helium-containing region in the core expands and the maximum temperature increases, causing the Sun's energy output to increase. core, which is where nuclear fusion occurs. This cutaway showcases the various regions of the surface and interior of the Sun, including the. The Sun emits the equivalent of 4 × 10 26 J of energy each second, by comparison, some 2 billion times more energy than the Tsar Bomba gave off. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Sun's energy comes from the hottest regions 99% of the Sun's energy output comes from regions at 10 million K or hotter, despite the fact that such a region makes up only a small percentage of the core's volume. The aforementioned Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear explosion ever to take place on Earth, gave off the equivalent of 50 megatons of TNT: 210 petajoules of energy. If you look at total energy, there's no comparison. "How," you might wonder, "can a miniature version of the Sun that only ignites for a fraction of a second reach higher temperatures than the very center of the Sun?"Īnd it's a reasonable question to ask. National Solar Observatory / AURA / National Science Foundation / Inouye Solar Telescope
While the outer photosphere of the Sun may be at merely 6,000 K, the inner core reaches temperatures as high as 15,000,000 K. Texas-sized convective cells on the Sun's surface in higher resolution than ever before. This snippet of the 'first light' image released by NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope shows the. This is the hottest temperature achieved in a star like our Sun. As you go closer towards the center, the temperature rises and rises, to a peak of 15 million K in the very center. At some critical location, temperatures rise past a threshold of around 4 million K, which is the energy threshold necessary for nuclear fusion to begin. The majority of the Sun's volume is composed of the radiative zone, where temperatures increase from the thousands into the millions of K. (Or kelvin, whose units we'll use from now on.) By contrast, inside the Sun, the temperature is a relatively cool ~6,000 K at the edge of the photosphere, but rises as you travel down towards the Sun's core through the various layers. It's true: the hottest hydrogen bombs, leveraging the power of nuclear fusion, have indeed achieved temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius. perhaps the most famous example of a fusion weapon ever created, with a 50 megaton yield that far surpasses any other ever developed. The 1961 Tsar Bomba explosion was the largest nuclear detonation ever to take place on Earth, and is. When nuclear fusion occurs, even greater amounts of energy are released, epitomized by the Soviet Union's 1960 detonation of the Tsar Bomba. The nuclear explosion compresses and heats the material inside, achieving the high temperatures and densities necessary to ignite that runaway nuclear reaction. Even a few fractions-of-a-second afterwards, the rapid, adiabatic expansion of the gas inside causes the temperature to drop dramatically.īut in a multi-stage atomic bomb, a small fission bomb is placed around material that's suitable for nuclear fusion.
For the early, single-stage atomic bombs we had on Earth, that meant the initial detonation was where the highest temperatures occurred. The hottest part of any explosion occurs in the initial stages, when the majority of the energy gets released but remains in a very small volume of space. The highest temperatures come in the earliest moments of ignition, before the volume of the explosion dramatically increases. respective 16, 25, 53, and 100 milliseconds after ignition. These four panels show the Trinity test explosion, the world's first nuclear (fission) bomb, at a.
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