Toby Kim

            It is an undeniable fact that one of the most essential energy sources to earth was the sunlight. It enabled various things on earth. Sunlight helped plants grow and cold-blooded animals control their body temperature. Sunlight also supplied essential vitamins and nutrients to people and kept them healthy. These days, people are even using sunlight to generate electricity using solar panels to collect sunlight. It is amazing that the sun has been producing this important sunlight for over 4 billion years. The sunlight is the result of the nuclear fusion of the atoms of the sun.

            The center of the sun, which is also called as the core, has pressures and temperatures that are extremely high that they can force nuclei of the atoms to do fusion. When this kind of nuclear fusion reaction occurs, energy is produced. The mankind utilized this type of reaction in order to create hydrogen bomb, which emits massive amounts of light and energy and is capable of destroying thousands of buildings and killing millions of people. In the sun, the “proton-proton cycle” occurs in order to produce energy. In the proton-proton cycle reaction, hydrogen nuclei change into helium nuclei, which produce gamma rays that are hot and contain a lot of energy. After the energy is produced from the core, it takes about million years for the energy to go through the layer of the sun. While passing through the layer, photons in the ray are continuously changed and converted. The energy produced is then emitted as energy particles, which are sunlight.

            The sun is largely divided into 2 parts. They are the core and the layer. The core is where hydrogen nuclei are initially converted to Helium atoms. The core takes up about 40% of the radius of the sun. The rest of the 60% is the radioactive layer of the sun. This is where the energy produced by the reaction in the core is transported to the surface of the sun. The core is made up of 62% helium nuclei and the layer is made up of 72% hydrogen.

            The energy on the surface of the sun is enormous. The energy emitted from the surface reaches about 230 million watts per square meter. When the sunlight energy reaches the earth though, it is reduced to about millionth of its original, which warms the earth and sustains various lives on the earth. Therefore, we can see that by nuclear fusion, sun has generated sunlight energy and supported the environment of the earth.