Why is the Sun so hot?
The Sun is a gigantic naturally occurring hydrogen bomb.. It is composed mostly of hydrogen, with a small percentage of helium and trace amounts of other elements, but is so huge that its own weight compressed the hydrogen at the core to the point where nuclear fusion can take place. Hydrogen is consumed at a rate of billions of tonnes every second. By human standards this is such a ridiculously fierce explosion that if we could set off our entire global nuclear arsenal at once on the surface of the Sun, we wouldn’t be able to spot where the explosion was taking place! All this nuclear activity takes place at the core of the Sun, where it reaches a temperature of over 10 million degrees centigrade, but there is enough material insulating the surface that it never gets hotter than a relatively chilly six thousand degrees…
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