• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Earth Is Technically Inside The Sun’s Atmosphere, But That Might Not Be The Case Forever

December 6, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Though it might not seem like it on a cold day in winter, the Earth is actually technically inside the atmosphere of the Sun. But evidence outlined in a recent paper suggests it hasn’t always been, and may leave its protection again.

The Sun, being the perfect storm of “really far” and “really hot”, makes it pretty difficult to study its interior structure. But like we can study the Earth’s interior by looking at seismic waves traveling through it, we can look at waves traveling through the Sun and their effect on electromagnetic waves at the Sun’s surface to get a better understanding of its insides. 

Advertisement

“The Doppler effect is the stretching or squashing of waves because of motion, whether it’s motion of the thing emitting the wave or motion of the thing receiving the wave,” Stephen Serjeant, Professor of Astronomy at the Open University, explains in a piece for The Conversation.

“In this case, sound waves wash through the Sun and reach the surface, and so the Sun’s surface moves towards or away from SOHO [Solar and Heliospheric Observatory]. The sun’s surface also gives off light, and the motion means the light waves are squashed or stretched. This change in wavelength is what the SOHO spacecraft measures, and the team translates this into information about the sound waves that reached the surface.”

Through this and other methods, we have determined that the Sun has a core that rotates around four times faster than the surface. That core, where hydrogen is fused into helium, is encased by a radiative zone, then the convection zone, followed by the chromosphere and its corona.



 

Advertisement

But the Sun doesn’t really end there. The Sun holds onto its atmosphere, just like the Earth, and it’s a whopper. 

“Once material leaves the corona at supersonic speeds, it becomes the solar wind, which forms a huge magnetic ‘bubble’ around the Sun, called the heliosphere. The heliosphere extends beyond the orbit of the planets in our Solar System,” NASA explains. “Thus, Earth exists inside the Sun’s atmosphere. Outside the heliosphere is interstellar space.”

Though being in the Sun’s atmosphere could sound a little scary, the heliosphere protects us from the interstellar medium. A recent study found that the heliosphere may have contracted as the Solar System passed through a cold gas cloud a few million years ago, potentially affecting the Earth’s climate.  The contraction of the heliosphere could have lasted from hundreds of years to a million years, according to the team, and it is likely we will encounter another such heliosphere-contracting cloud within another million years or so. 

“It has been suggested that climate changes around this time could have affected human evolution. The hypothesis is that the emergence of our species Homo sapiens was shaped by the need to adapt to climate change,” the team explained in their paper. “With the shrinkage of the heliosphere, the Earth was exposed directly to the ISM [Interstellar Medium].”

Advertisement

In short, we are technically inside the Sun’s atmosphere and that’s a good thing. But we might not be forever.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Lacking Company, A Dolphin In The Baltic Is Talking To Himself

Source Link: The Earth Is Technically Inside The Sun's Atmosphere, But That Might Not Be The Case Forever

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Watch This Funky Sea Pig Dancing Its Way Through The Deep Sea, Over 2,300 Meters Below The Surface
  • NASA Lets YouTuber Steve Mould Test His “Weird Chain Theory” In Space
  • The Oldest Stalagmite Ever Dated Was Found In Oklahoma Rocks, Dating Back 289 Million Years
  • 2024’s Great American Eclipse Made Some Birds Behave In Surprising Ways, But Not All Were Fooled
  • “Carter Catastrophe”: The Math Equation That Predicts The End Of Humanity
  • Why Is There No Nobel Prize For Mathematics?
  • These Are The Only Animals Known To Incubate Eggs In Their Stomachs And Give “Birth” Out Their Mouths
  • Constipated? This One Fruit Could Help, Says First-Ever Evidence-Led Diet Guidance
  • NGC 2775: This Galaxy Breaks The Rules Of “Galactic Evolution” And Baffles Astronomers
  • Meet The “Four-Eyed” Hirola, The World’s Most Endangered Antelope With Fewer Than 500 Left
  • The Bizarre 1997 Experiment That Made A Frog Levitate
  • There’s A Very Good Reason Why October 1582 On Your Phone Is Missing 10 Days
  • Skynet-1A: Military Spacecraft Launched 56 Years Ago Has Been Moved By Persons Unknown
  • There’s A Simple Solution To Helping Avoid Erectile Dysfunction (But You’re Not Going To Like It)
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS May Be 10 Billion Years Old, This Rare Spider Is Half-Female, Half-Male Split Down The Middle, And Much More This Week
  • Why Do Trains Not Have Seatbelts? It’s Probably Not What You Think
  • World’s Driest Hot Desert Just Burst Into A Rare And Fleeting Desert Bloom
  • Theoretical Dark Matter Infernos Could Melt The Earth’s Core, Turning It Liquid
  • North America’s Largest Mammal Once Numbered 60 Million – Then Humans Nearly Drove It To Extinction
  • North America’s Largest Ever Land Animal Was A 21-Meter-Long Titan
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version