Community Magazine March 2019

92 Community Magazine Peleh the BoyWonder Have You Ever Wondered… Child Prodigy PelehWunder – more commonly known as Peleh the BoyWonder Does the sun have a surface? T he sun is a ball of gas, so it does not have a solid surface like the Earth. However, there are different layers of the sun, just as there are different layers of the Earth.The sun has six layers: the core, the radiative zone, the convective zone, the photosphere, the chromosphere, and the corona. The photosphere is the visible surface of the sun. It is the disk you see in the sky when you look at the sun through a telescope. (Never look at the sun directly, as it can cause blindness; always use a filtered telescope.) In some ways, the photosphere of the sun is like the crust of the Earth. Both the photosphere and the crust are many miles thick. The top of the crust is the surface of the Earth. If we could stand on the moon and look at the Earth, we would see Earth’s surface, its crust. In the same way, if we look at the sun, we see the photosphere. The following quote, from noted astronomer Professor N. Nidal, senior astronomer at the Greenwich Observatory in England, Professor of Astronomy at Australia’s National University, and visiting professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, can help explain the important role of the photosphere: “The sun is a ball of gas, whose outermost temperature is 6000 degrees Centigrade. Gases at much higher temperature flow beneath the surface. According to our estimates, the temperature continues to rise as we approach the center of the sun, where it reaches 15,000,000 degrees Centigrade. Today we picture the center of the sun as a type of “nuclear reactor” that releases vast quantities of heat, which make their way slowly outward. As it moves out, the strength of this heat diminishes until it reaches the surface layer where it is ‘only’ 6000 degrees Centigrade. The extremely high temperatures within the sun cause gas storms of tremendous proportions, which even form waves that crash against the surface gases with unbelievable force. These outer layers themselves absorb the heat being radiated from within the sun, and restrain the shockwaves caused by these waves striking it. We call this outer layer the sheath.” Of course our Sages from thousands of years ago were well aware of the protective role of the photosphere, even without the aid of telescopes or satellites (see Torah Talk section). Convective Zone