Does the sun's surface really burn or the flame on the sun's surface is just an illusion??

Question

I'm just wondering how can the sun's surface burn without oxygen.

Answer 1

There are all sorts of gases in the corona of the sun.
And nuclear explosions going on within.

Answer 2

It is not a chemical reaction but a thermonuclear reaction. You can have a tungsten filament at white heat in a vacuum bulb which has no oxygen (in fact, if oxygen is present, the filament will burn off) just by electrical heating, so light can come without a chemical reaction. In the case of sun, hydrogen nuclei get converted into helium nuclei under the tremendous pressure and temperature at the core of the sun. Surface is at a much lesser temperature of only 6000 degrees because of losses due to radiation.

Answer 3

Yes the Sun is on fire. It would really be more accurate to say the Sun is exploding. However, the Sun has so much gravity that the the explosion continually is sucked inwards which prevents the Sun from going supernova and destroying our solar system.

The Suns fuel source is pure hydrogen and uses a process called nuclear fusion which turns hydrogen into helium and energy.

It might interest you to know scientists are trying to use this same method to generate electricity but obviously it's dangerous.

Answer 4

The sun is not burning in the conventional sense. The sun is a massive ball of gas. What you see as flame is really superheated gas known as a plasma. The heat is generated deep within at the core by thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium which generates tremendous amounts of energy. This energy completely ionizes the gas (which is what a plasma is) which in turn magnetizes the sun and is responsible for many of the effects we see, such as solar flares and sunspots.

The gravitational tendency of this gas to collapse in on itself is balanced by the radiation pressure of the fusion reactions at the core and this is ultimately what heats the sun and of course Earth.

Answer 5

The Sun is composed of hydrogen (about 74% of its mass, or 92% of its volume), helium (about 25% of mass, 7% of volume), and trace quantities of other elements. The Sun has a spectral class of G2V. G2 implies that it has a surface temperature of approximately 5,500 K (or approximately 9,600 degrees Fahrenheit / 5,315 Celsius), giving it a white color which, because of atmospheric scattering, appears yellow as seen from the surface of the Earth. This is a subtractive effect, as the preferential scattering of blue photons (causing the sky color) removes enough blue light to leave a residual reddishness that is perceived as yellow. (If low enough in the sky, the Sun appears orange or red, due to this scattering.)

Its spectrum contains lines of ionized and neutral metals as well as very weak hydrogen lines. The V (Roman five) suffix indicates that the Sun, like most stars, is a main sequence star. This means that it generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium and is in a state of hydrostatic balance, neither contracting nor expanding over time. There are more than 100 million G2 class stars in our galaxy. Because of logarithmic size distribution, the Sun is actually brighter than 85% of the stars in the galaxy, most of which are red dwarfs.

Answer 6

These are huge nuclear reactions. The Sun is composed of hydrogen, helium, and trace quantities of other elements. Through most of the Sun's life, energy is produced by nuclear fusion through a series of steps called the p-p (proton-proton) chain; this process converts hydrogen into helium - this emits a hell lot of energy, which is also visible as light (flame). The visible light we see is produced as electrons react with hydrogen atoms to produce H- ions. The rate of nuclear fusion depends strongly on density (and particularly on temperature), so the fusion rate in the core is in a self-correcting equilibrium: a slightly higher rate of fusion would cause the core to heat up more and expand slightly against the weight of the outer layers, reducing the fusion rate and correcting the perturbation; and a slightly lower rate would cause the core to cool and shrink slightly, increasing the fusion rate and again reverting it to its present level.

The cool flames we see are mostly because of the plasmatic state of the Sun.

The optical surface of the Sun (the photosphere) is known to have a temperature of approximately 6,000 K. Above it lies the solar corona at a temperature of 1,000,000 K. The high temperature of the corona shows that it is heated by something other than direct heat conduction from the photosphere.

It is thought that the energy necessary to heat the corona is provided by turbulent motion in the convection zone below the photosphere, and two main mechanisms have been proposed to explain coronal heating. The first is wave heating, in which sound, gravitational and magnetohydrodynamic waves are produced by turbulence in the convection zone. These waves travel upward and dissipate in the corona, depositing their energy in the ambient gas in the form of heat. The other is magnetic heating, in which magnetic energy is continuously built up by photospheric motion and released through magnetic reconnection in the form of large solar flares and myriad similar but smaller events.

A solar flare is a violent explosion in the Sun's atmosphere with an energy equivalent to a billion megatons, traveling normally at about 1 million km per hour (about 0.05% the speed of light), though sometimes much faster. The flares have been known to affect the electro transmission of many earthly communication devices including computers, cell phones, pagers and automobiles. Solar flares take place in the solar corona and chromosphere, heating plasma to tens of millions of kelvins and accelerating the resulting electrons, protons and heavier ions to near the speed of light . They produce electromagnetic radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum at all wavelengths from long-wave radio to the shortest wavelength gamma rays. Most flares occur around sunspots, where intense magnetic fields emerge from the Sun's surface into the corona. The energy efficiency associated with solar flares may take several hours or even days to build up, but most flares take only a matter of minutes to release their energy.

Answer 7

The flames are quite real but the source of heat is nuclear instead of chemical based fire.

Flames are gas that have been ionized by heat and as the ions capture electrons, light is released, making the gas glow.

Answer 8

Those are nuclear explosions