• Question: how was the sun made

    Asked by flowers28 to Edd, Jess, Zara on 23 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      Hi flowers28!

      This is maybe a question for a physicist… but here’s what I’ve read! 🙂

      The sun is thought to have formed over 4.5 billion years ago. It probably started out as a big swirling cloud of gas and dust… gravity caused the cloud to get flatter and start collapsing to form a bulge in the middle. Inside this bulge, gravity kept working! It pushed everything closer and closer together and the temperature started to get really hot! More and more matter started collapsing into the centre, increasing the temperature even more until eventually, it kicked off nuclear reactions – and so our star started burning quite happily!

      The sun is basically a big ball of burning gas… mostly hydrogen and also helium

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      Zara answered this above already!

      There is also a good explanation from an earlier IAS: http://ias.im/33.70

Comments