It's Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and that means the Sun is back. But it's more than just a free heat lamp for your garden, it's an incredible, dynamic nuclear reaction complete with flares, coronal mass ejections, twisting magnetic fields and the solar wind. Put in your headphones, head outside and enjoy the sunshine while you listen to this week's podcast.

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Degrees Kelvin!!!!!!

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

So the 'light' we're seeing from the sun is actually about 10 million years and 8 minutes old?

Plus the time for your brain to process the information

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

What? No April 1st edition?

I was thinking of doing an astrology episode. :-)

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

Pamela twice referred to the idea that in 50 million years, the sun will be hot enough to affect our oceans.

Seriously? Doesn't that mean that, geologically speaking, we are living in the last phase of life on earth?

Not life, but it's going to get more and more difficult for larger forms of life as the Sun outputs more energy. A great book on this is called the Life and Death of Planet Earth.

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

Obvioustroll,

Pamela remembers reading a paper with the number 50 million years. Here's a source where Peter Ward says it will be less than 1 billion. We'll try and find the paper she read if you're really curious.

But to answer your question:

It depends on the length of the phases - we're currently at the end of a phase and going through a massive extinction. The next phase of life will be adapted to much higher temperatures.

-Rebecca
Astronomy Cast Student Worker

I encourage anyone interested in following the magnetic structures on the solar surface to visit the webpage of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) SOLIS (Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun) telescope. SOLIS takes two daily magnetic maps of the Sun and stream them onto the web as soon as they are processed. The images can be found at solis.nso.edu.

While there, have a look around the NSO webpage. It is after all, YOUR national observatory!

Cheers,
Claude

Hi Fraser

In the beginning of the podcast for the 'Sun' show Pamela states that the sun has been in existence for the past 5 Billion years, that's fine but then she goes on to say that it still has a life of 50 Billion years, I thought it only has another life of 5 not 50 billion years - Am I correct or is Pamela??

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Ilyas

Hi Community,

My first post from OZ.

It's refreshing to hear that as the sun gets less massive our orbits will change with the rest of the solar system. This will be a chaotic and hot period indeed.

According to current theory, yes, but fifty million years from now, current theory will be quite evolved.

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jwj

It's ok not to know. We should try harder to find out.

Ilyas,

You're right - the Sun will live for another ~5 Billion years. So sorry for the error - seems it just slipped out. We all make mistakes.

We double checked all the numbers (everything else is correct) and I corrected that one in the transcript. Unfortunately Pamela was out of town when I caught the error and we couldn't record a fix.

Hope that clears things up.

Rebecca
Astronomy Cast student worker

Another great show, guys. Also, thanks for the notes on the site with the anomation of the sun. Looks almost like my BBQ when it gets good and hot... NOT! Keep it up!!!