Why are there black patches on the suns surface?
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The sun glows in part for the same reason hot cinders in a campfire do. Warm things glow. The hotter the thing is, the harsher it glows, and the higher wavelengths it emits. It’s called blackbody radiation.
You and everything around you are glowing right now, you just don’t see it because the glow of room-temperature stuff is only visible in infrared. This is the light that night vision cameras can see. Get something hotter, and it will start glowing in wavelengths that your eye *can* see. Hot coals, as well as the sun, are definitely hot enough to do that.
If you poke a hot coal in a campfire from a safe distance with some kind of long stick-like tool, particularly metal ones, you may notice that the spot you poke stops glowing and turns black. That’s because the heat from the part you poked is draining away into the stick. This lowers the temperature of the coal at that spot, which causes it to glow less brightly, and probably stop glowing in visible light altogether.
This is what sunspots, those “black patches” on the sun, are. Colder spots. They glow less brightly than the hotter spots.
Now, “colder” here is obviously relative. You would be just as vaporized in a sunspot as you would be anywhere else on the Sun’s surface. It’s just not *as* hot there.
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