: Why do they say the area around the sun is hotter than the surface itself, it doesn’t make any sense.

Question

How can the empty space around the sun be millions of degrees hot and the surface only thousands ? it doesn’t make any sense.

In: 96

Answer 1

Here’s a simplified breakdown:

The surface of the sun is like a fire, simply put, with fuel constantly bubbling up from below and continuing the blaze. Like all fires with consistent and steady fuel supply, the temperature remains relatively stable so long as there’s a stable and consistent balance between the smolder and the fuel. This process will go on and on for as long as the fuel is abundant.
Now the fire doesn’t just get hotter and hotter. It is dispersing the heat it produces constantly. This heat is expressed in various ways, whether it be through electromagnetic radiation or via ‘smoke’ (for lack of a better descriptive term but fitting in that it exhibits the concept well) which can be described as spent fuel or byproducts of combustion that get ejected out of the fire as a byproduct of the reaction taking place.
So, in essence, you have two cool materials, they interact, and become a different chemical composition and heat is produced in this process. The original fuel (think oxygen + gasoline) is burned and you produce heat and smoke. The temperature at the level of the fire, however, is relatively constant as it does not hold on to the heat it produces. And therein lies the bulk of the answer you are looking for.
As other commenters have outlined, and are way too technical for an ELI5, they bring in the fact that we cannot adequately explain the nuance to this… But it is indeed well-conceptualized as follows:
The heat produced by the smoldering blaze is not held within the fire itself but ejected outward as previously mentioned, in the form of light/radiation and of course particulate matter as well. This particulate matter (again think of smoke) is exceedingly hot as it is carrying some of the heat energy produced by the fire. This is what is accumulating in the outer atmosphere (again an inaccurate term, per se, but descriptive) of the sun itself. A similar conceptualization could be that of greenhouse gases accumulating on earth, holding on to acquired heat energy leading to global warming (an inaccurate example, but illustrative nonetheless).

TLDR: Sun fire can be likened to combustion where fuel==>reaction= byproducts + heat. Byproducts are hotter than original fuel and carry heat to atmosphere but are held there due to gravity/magnetosphere/solar convection patterns and accumulate leading to massive temperature elevations beyond that of the fire/reaction itself.