Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

OUR SUN (AKA, THE NUCLEAR EXPLOSION THAT KEEPS US ALIVE) WITH PROFESSOR MORGANA MAYHEM

WELCOME TO YOUR SECOND CLASS, YOU LITTLE SCOUNDRELS. I'M GOING TO START WITH A QUESTION. HAVE YOU EVER WARMED YOURSELF BY THE LIGHT OF A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION. Well, if you've ever been out in the Sun, the answer is "YES." It's honestly silly how much we take the Sun for granted. Every single day, our planet spins around the vacuum of space and a gigantic deadly fireball of doom lights up the sky. For some reason, people seem to think this is pretty normal and even say things like "That's nice" and "Ooh, what a lovely day." HUMANS ARE VERY WEIRD, I TELL YOU.

Okay, I have a confession. Calling the Sun a FIREBALL just now was kind of a lie. The Sun isn't really made of fire. The Sun is actually made of stuff called plasma which is MUCH hotter than boring old fire. HERE'S THE THING: THE SUN IS SO BIG AND HOT AND POWERFUL, IT'S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO IMAGINE. And I'm the person who designed the infamous chocolate-powered reverse gravity shoes, so I can imagine some pretty strange things.

HERE'S HOW RIDICULOUS THE SUN IS: IT'S SO BIG, YOU COULD FIT MORE THAN 1,500,000 PLANET EARTHS INSIDE IT THE TEMPERATURE AT THE SURFACE IS NEARLY 11,000°F RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE, THE TEMPERATURE REACHES ABOUT 27,000,000°F HOW DOES SOMETHING LIKE THIS EVEN EXIST? I think the best thing to do is to go back to the beginning of our SOLAR SYSTEM and find out how the Sun was made. If for some reason you haven't got a time machine handy, you'll just have to use your imagination. TIME: 4,600,000,000 years ago. About 3pm.

It all started with a cloud of gas. It's a very thin cloud of gas so thin that if you were floating in the middle of the cloud, you'd think you were in empty space. (It's also made of hydrogen, which you can't breathe anyway. So you wouldn't really want to be floating in the middle of it.) This faintly glowing cloud is also huge; MILLIONS and MILLIONS of miles across. So there's a LOT of gas in there. THIS IS HOW OUR SUN BEGAN. For the first few million years, the cloud probably sat around doing nothing at all. A bit like you on a Sunday morning. Now, we wait. Just kidding. LET'S FAST-FORWARD TO THE EXCITING BIT.