what degrees is the sun ?

Question: what degrees is the sun ?
- Keywords:
  degrees
Asked by caitlink0406 to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 14 Jun 2011.
- Drew Rae answered on 13 Jun 2011:
  
  Hi Caitlin,
  It depends which part of the sun you are standing on. :-). If you’re in the very middle, we don’t know for sure, but we think it is about 15 000 000 (15 million) degrees. If you’re at the edge, it’s more like five and a half thousand degrees.
  
  Because there isn’t much matter in the space between us and the sun, the energy gets to us by a process called radiation. Because it has to spread out over a bigger and bigger sphere as it gets further away from the sun, the energy spreads out until it is gentle and warm by the time it reaches us.
- Julia Griffen answered on 13 Jun 2011:
  
  Hi Caitlin,
  Drew’s completely right.
  So here on earth we don’t feel it being that hot, as drew said its because we’re far away and the heat is spread out… you can get an idea of how hot the sun is… PROCEED with CAUTION…
  Did you know you can focus the energy of the sun through a magnifine glass, this produces a focused beam of light that can burn through paper! Of cause becareful! This of course is again only a fraction of the suns heat! Happy experimenting!
- Kimberley Bryon answered on 13 Jun 2011:
  
  Great question. Drew and Julia have answered this really well. Julia is right, I once accidently set fire to my grandmother’s carpet by knocking the magnifying glass that she uses for sewing in to the path of strong sunshine 🙁
- Amy MacQueen answered on 13 Jun 2011:
  
  Yep the sun is HOT ….just as well we are at just the right distance from it for surviving! The sun can also cause us UV damage to our skin which increases the risk of cancer by mutating our DNA…so always wear suncream!! oh and don’t look a the sun – its dangerous! 🙂
- Sara Imari Walker answered on 14 Jun 2011:
  
  I think Amy, Drew, Julia, and Kimberley have covered that the Sun is HOT! Over 5,000 degrees on its surface hot. What I think is really neat is that you can actually tell the temperature of a star by its color. Some of my favorite stars in the night sky are blue – they are the really really hot ones with surfaces over 30,000 degrees! Red stars in contrast are much cooler than our Sun. What is neat is that we can tell their surface temperatures from really really far away just based on their color. All yellow stars have a temperature about the same as our sun.

Question: what degrees is the sun ?

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