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The Sun is composed primarily of the chemical elements hydrogen and helium; they account for 74.9% and 23.8%, respectively, of the mass of the Sun in the photosphere.All heavier elements, colloquially called metals in stellar astronomy, account for less than 2% of the mass, with oxygen (roughly 1% of the Sun's mass), carbon (0.3%), neon (0.2%), and iron (0.2%) being the most abundant.
The Sun's atmosphere is composed of five layers: the photosphere, the chromosphere, the transition region, the corona, and the heliosphere. The coolest layer of the Sun is a temperature minimum region extending to about 500 km above the photosphere, and has a temperature of about 4,100 K. [77]
The photosphere, which is the atmosphere's lowest and coolest layer, is normally its only visible part. [1] Light escaping from the surface of the star stems from this region and passes through the higher layers. The Sun's photosphere has a temperature in the 5,770–5,780 K (5,500–5,510 °C; 9,930–9,940 °F) range.
Together, the new images showcase the sun’s varied and complex layers. ... Nearly all radiation from the sun originates from the photosphere, with sizzling temperatures ranging between 8,132 and ...
The red color of the chromosphere could be seen during the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999.. The density of the Sun's chromosphere decreases exponentially with distance from the center of the Sun by a factor of roughly 10 million, from about 2 × 10 −4 kg/m 3 at the chromosphere's inner boundary to under 1.6 × 10 −11 kg/m 3 at the outer boundary. [7]
In the Sun, the region between the solar core at 0.2 of the Sun's radius and the outer convection zone at 0.71 of the Sun's radius is referred to as the radiation zone, although the core is also a radiative region. [1] The convection zone and the radiative zone are divided by the tachocline, another part of the Sun.
In solar physics, a coronal loop is a well-defined arch-like structure in the Sun's atmosphere made up of relatively dense plasma confined and isolated from the surrounding medium by magnetic flux tubes. Coronal loops begin and end at two footpoints on the photosphere and project into the transition region and lower corona.
For example, since the Sun formed, some of the helium and heavy elements have settled out of the photosphere by diffusion. As a result, the Solar photosphere now contains about 87% as much helium and heavy elements as the protostellar photosphere had; the protostellar Solar photosphere was 71.1% hydrogen, 27.4% helium, and 1.5% metals. [2]