The Sun Is Weirder Than You Think

Cleo Abram (0:00)

If you dove into the sun, the first layer you'd hit is hot enough to make diamonds boil. If you keep going, you're passing through churning bubbles the size of France, and then you're lost in a zone so dense that light itself takes 170,000 years to escape. And you're still not at the place where it unleashes enough energy to power up the sun.

Right now, we're in a golden age of new solar science. We're getting close up pictures of the sun's surface in more detail than ever before, sending probes into its atmosphere and revealing secrets about our star we never thought possible. Trust me, after this video, you'll never look up at the sun the same way. So let me take you on a journey into the sun.

This episode was made possible by AT&T, the official connectivity partner of Huge If True. A lot of people picture the sun as a giant ball of fire, but that's totally wrong. There's nothing actually burning up there. Imagine you and I get into a magical spaceship and blast off toward the sun. As soon as we get about six times Earth's diameter away, our little ship is starting to detect something. We think we're on a journey into the sun, but really, is it true to say that in some sense, we are inside the sun right now?

SPEAKER_2 (1:38)

Oh, 100%.

Cleo Abram (1:39)

That is the head of heliophysics at NASA. He's in charge of all of NASA's research on the sun. And he's saying, if you zoom out to see our whole solar system and then zoom a little bit further, you'd see that our sun's outer atmosphere actually swallows earth and then keeps going. This is the heliosphere and it's huge. It goes about 100 times farther than the distance between earth and the sun.

SPEAKER_2 (2:05)

We are living not just with a star, but living in a star's atmosphere, which is pretty cool.

Cleo Abram (2:11)

As we fly through it, we see that the heliosphere is made of the sun blasting out these charged particles more and more as we fly toward it. From here, we can see so much cool tech humans have sent to study the sun before us. We already passed around 40 satellites orbiting earth studying the sun, and now we're speeding past a very special one. This is the Solar Dynamics Observatory. It's snapping pictures of the sun in all these different wavelengths.

SPEAKER_2 (2:34)

It's one of the biggest datasets that we have at NASA, and it's frankly the beating heart of watching the sun every day and its activity and its changes.

Cleo Abram (2:43)

But we keep going closer, and there are still two spacecraft ahead of us.

SPEAKER_2 (2:47)

The two of them are Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe.

Cleo Abram (2:50)

Solar Orbiter is a big deal because it took the first ever pictures of the sun's south pole. For scale, here's how big the earth would be in this video.

But only one spacecraft has ever gone into the sun's inner atmosphere. At this point, our little ship is starting to feel more of the sun's effects. Uh, that can't be good. But we need to keep going because the sun is way farther away than most people think. If you paused the whole solar system, at the closest point with a normal walking pace, it would take you over 3,000 years to reach the sun. You could line up all of the planets between the earth and the sun 374 times. But it's not just the distance that's the problem. The earth is rapidly moving sideways compared to the sun. So to get there, we have to cancel that out, which would take more energy than it would take to escape the entire solar system. That's why, when NASA sent the Parker Solar Probe, it took over 6 years to spiral inward until 2021, when it crossed into the corona. This is the sun's inner atmosphere. It's the part that you see during a solar eclipse, and it's beautiful.

When Parker first crossed into it, the probe was still about 9 times farther from the sun than the sun itself is wide. But Parker's been making passes closer and closer, faster and faster ever since. It's now the fastest object humans have ever made. It could get from London to Paris in 2 seconds. But funny enough, the scientists who made it don't actually like that.

SPEAKER_3 (4:37)

And I don't like it. I would like it to slow down. I want Parker to spend as much time as possible very close to the sun, so we can get all the wealth of the data.