Right now, the sun is shining through my window. It feels warm on my muzzle.
I talked about the sun with Guy Worthey. He’s a professor of astronomy and physics at Washington State University.
He told me that our lives depend on the sun.
“The sun keeps you warm and powers everything,” Worthey said. “Without it, Earth would be a frozen nightmare.”
The sun is a yellow dwarf star. It’s made of super-hot gases. Since it isn’t solid, the part of the sun we call the surface is really its inner atmosphere—called the photosphere. If you could stick a thermometer into the photosphere, it would read 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But the sun’s outer atmosphere—called the corona—reaches a whopping 3.5 million degrees.
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