![]() If you could land here, all that extra weight would crush your bones and pulverize your internal organs. Down here, you'll start to feel pretty lousy, because the sun's gravity is so strong, a 150-pound person on Earth would weigh about 4,000 pounds here. This is the surface of the sun we see every day. ![]() And they can reach over 10,000 degrees Celsius, exactly the sort of obstacle you'd want to avoid when flying a spacecraft into the sun.Īnd the next layer is just as perilous: the photosphere. These loops of gas are suspended by a powerful magnetic field and stretched for tens of thousands of kilometers beyond the sun. See that massive plume? That's called a solar prominence. But we'll need something even better as we get closer.Īt about 3,000 kilometers above the surface, we reach the chromosphere, the second layer of the sun. Now, the probe's heat shield works like a very good mirror, reflecting 99.9% of the incoming light. And it's tens of thousands of times brighter here than on Earth. It blazes at 1 million degrees Celsius, nearly 900 times as hot as lava. At 7 million to 10 million kilometers above the sun's surface, we reach the corona, the outermost layer of the sun. But what if we wanted an even closer look? In 2018, it launched the Parker Solar Probe, which is swooping to within 6.2 million kilometers of the Sun's surface, the closest we've ever been. Narrator: Right now, NASA is exploring the sun like never before. ![]() Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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