3 minute read
Wha t’s going on...Sun recipe
Wondering what is inside the Sun was mostly conjecture up until the 19th century when scientists began to find clues in sunlight.
Decades before quantum mechanics explained the energy levels within atoms, many scientists were noticing that heated substances could be identified by the fingerprint like lines found in the glowing light they emitted. Known as spectroscopy, the technique of examining light for what lies within is dramatically shown on the cover of Pink Floyd’s album, Dark Side of the Moon. Watching a whole range of visible colours emerge from what was once just white light is not really something we should consider obvious. Similarly, when German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff heated hydrogen gas and observed very specific coloured lines of visible light, he had no reasons to explain the colours, but the line pattern was not random. If hydrogen was present in any mixture of gas it could be identified by these lines when examining the emerging light. Alongside hydrogen, other elements and molecules soon had their ‘fingerprints’ meticulously recorded and utilised in chemical analysis. [1]
Kirchhoff and others turned their attention to sunlight and found evidence for all kinds of elements, including iron, calcium and a previously unknown element, helium. Although a list of Sun ingredients could now be made, it was still difficult to know how much of each was present. The relative abundance of star ingredients was solved in 1925, when British born Cecilia Payne looked at light from thousands of other stars and then used a statistical analysis which mixed classical notions of temperature with the newly acquired knowledge of atomic quantum energies. Writing her doctorate thesis at Harvard, Cecilia concluded that hydrogen was dominant in all stars, including our Sun. [2]
With modern theories and space missions confirming that the Sun’s mass consists of about 70% hydrogen and 27% helium, it is amazing that other elements can be detected so readily via spectroscopy. We still have much to learn about our nearest star and NASA has recently sent the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft to study up close the Sun’s magnetic fields and solar wind. As I write this, the Parker Probe is about to lose contact with NASA as it approaches the Sun for just its second time! [3]
REFERENCES [1] Carroll & Ostlie 1996, An Introduction to
Modern Astrophysics, Addison-Wesley
Publishing [2] Stry ker 1984, A Life in Astronomy, Science
Magazine, vol. 224, no. 4650, JSTOR Health &
General Sciences [3] https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/ parker-solar-probe (website visited 03-04-2019)
David Fletcher is a 45 year old undergraduate of Physics at Macquarie University. twitter contact @phys_fletcher
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