Robin Williams: “What’s the weather like out there? ‘It’s hot! Damn hot! Real hot!’ Well, tell me what it feels like. ‘Fool, it’s hot! I told you again! Were you born on the sun? It’s damn hot!’” and gusty.
With the most extreme weather in our solar system, the Sun generates its own wind with speeds varying between a gentle 500,000 MPH to a gusty 2,000,000 MPH. These winds carry with them a part of the Sun’s atmosphere, a million-℃ gas composed of highly energetic electrons, protons and alpha particles. The winds are accelerated along the sun’s outstretched, tentacle-like magnetic field, which originates deep under its surface and extends out past Earth to the edges of the solar system. Far above our heads, the Earth is regularly hit by colossal, tsunami-like waves of scorching gas and savage, supersonic winds from Sol.
The photosphere generates most of the visible light at a cool 5,500°C. Cooler still are the sunspots, at 4,000°C, as well as the faint chromosphere, red from concentrated hydrogen. But then, bizarrely, the outermost corona hits a scorching 10 million °C, blowing off as solar wind as it cools to 1 million °C.
Photos by NASA and astronomer Paul Andrew.
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