what is the maximunm temperature on sun's surface?
By jaginfo2006
@jaginfo2006 (1757)
India
4 responses
@estherlou (5015)
• United States
3 Dec 06
You made me curious. Here is some information. The Sun is, at present, about 70% hydrogen and 28% helium by mass everything else ("metals") amounts to less than 2%. This changes slowly over time as the Sun converts hydrogen to helium in its core.
The outer layers of the Sun exhibit differential rotation: at the equator the surface rotates once every 25.4 days; near the poles it's as much as 36 days. This odd behavior is due to the fact that the Sun is not a solid body like the Earth. Similar effects are seen in the gas planets. The differential rotation extends considerably down into the interior of the Sun but the core of the Sun rotates as a solid body.
Conditions at the Sun's core (approximately the inner 25% of its radius) are extreme. The temperature is 15.6 million Kelvin and the pressure is 250 billion atmospheres. At the center of the core the Sun's density is more than 150 times that of water.
The Sun's energy output (3.86e33 ergs/second or 386 billion billion megawatts) is produced by nuclear fusion reactions. Each second about 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted to about 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons (=3.86e33 ergs) of energy in the form of gamma rays. As it travels out toward the surface, the energy is continuously absorbed and re-emitted at lower and lower temperatures so that by the time it reaches the surface, it is primarily visible light. For the last 20% of the way to the surface the energy is carried more by convection than by radiation.
And then I had to go look up Kelvin...Kelvin temperature scale, a temperature scale having an absolute zero below which temperatures do not exist. Absolute zero, or 0K, is the temperature at which molecular energy is a minimum, and it corresponds to a temperature of -273.15° on the Celsius temperature scale. The Kelvin degree is the same size as the Celsius degree; hence the two reference temperatures for Celsius, the freezing point of water (0°C), and the boiling point of water (100°C), correspond to 273.15K and 373.15K, respectively. When writing temperatures in the Kelvin scale, it is the convention to omit the degree symbol and merely use the letter K. The temperature scale is named after the British mathematician and physicist William Thomson Kelvin, who proposed it in 1848.