I’ve read a lot of astronomy, and it’s always been emphasized how hot the Sun’s core is, 15 million C.
But HOW did we get to that number? Why specifically 15 million and not scientists ballparking it as ‘more than a million’?
I’ve studied transport phenomena in university, so I guessed that maybe they constructed an equation of temperature as a function of radius, and substituted r=0 to get 15 million. But it can’t possibly be that simple, as the Sun has different layers of unknown size (and if known, how do we know?) that we aren’t even about the properties.
If possible, explain this to me as simple as possible, while still describing simply the math that caused the scientist to arrive at the 15 million number
In: Planetary Science
Without visiting the core of the sun and taking a physical reading it is very much hard to record and state for a fact it is 15 million degrees or whatever
To my knowledge no one has stated the suns core is 15 million degrees as fact
But a lot of science has gone into figuring out a range of what it would most likely be and then that gets simplified so our text books would read 15 million degrees because that’s all anyone would need to know unless they were to get into the field itself in which they would then research the relevant papers and data and make their own observations
Science often isn’t down to exact sometimes it’s about ranges and probabilities until new data and/or analysis proves otherwise, we still learn something new here n there even within our own planet let alone the solar system or the universe for that matter
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