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Astroquizzical: What happens to light when it hits the Sun?

Июнь 2015
Опубликовано 2015-06-01 18:00

 

Astroquizzical:
What happens to light when it hits the Sun?

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/astroquizzical-what-happens-to-light-when-it-hits-the-sun-b55f68b46710

 

The Sun absorbs all the light that hits it. How long is it trapped?

If a photon of light escapes from a star, when it hits another star, does it get absorbed and have to complete another cycle before it can escape again?

When we look up at the night sky and see the stars, our eyeballs are absorbing photons of light from that star, and converting them into energy that our brains can process. Those photons have traveled between decades and millennia in most cases, and they have ended as an electrical signal going to your brain.

In principle, a photon from a star could be absorbed by anything, not just your eyeball. However, some objects are a little better at absorbing light than others. The absolute champions of absorbing light are called black body objects, which is a term applied to anything that absorbs all light. Any and all light that hits a black body gets absorbed; these objects glow due to their own heat. If that sounds suspiciously like a star, you’d be right. Stars are almost perfect black bodies- they’re one of the closest things to them in nature. If a photon from another star missed the earth, and hit the sun instead, that photon would be instantly absorbed into the sun.

In order to understand what happens next for that photon, we need to have a bit more understanding of how light gets to the surface of a star in the first place.

 

Image credit: NASA/Jenny Mottar. The major components of the Sun: the core, the radiative zone, and the convection zone, which ends at the surface.

 

 

Stars the size of our sun can generally be divided up into three sections. The innermost section is the core, where fusion occurs. This is where atoms are slammed together with such energy that they fuse together into larger atoms. For something the size of our sun, the only atoms that it can assemble are hydrogen atoms into helium. This is the simplest building block for elements, and takes the least amount of heat and pressure to do. As a byproduct of this building process, the star also creates light.

 

 

the full story  Astroquizzical:

What happens to light when it hits the Sun?

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/astroquizzical-what-happens-to-light-when-it-hits-the-sun-b55f68b46710


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