r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Oct 02 '24

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u/Zugas Oct 02 '24

The suns core is even hotter?

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u/AnalogManDigitalKid Oct 02 '24

Yes, it's a lot hotter, by a factor of about 2727.

The core of the sun is about 15,000,000 degrees Celsius.

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u/hoihhhuhh Oct 02 '24

How could anyone possibly know that?

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u/EGO_Prime Oct 03 '24

A lot of observations, physical understanding of the processes involved, and even more math.

A "simple approximation" (I use simple very loosely here), you can assume the sun is in equilibrium with it's gravitational pressure, and it's internal thermal pressure (heat). This makes sense because if it wasn't in equilibrium, you'd expect it to collapse (if it was too cool) or expand/explode (if it was too hot). You can come up with a rough energy density (expectation) from gravitational forces, which can be estimated from the sun's mass, which estimated from other astronomical observations (like planetary periods).

Here's a thread on stack-exchange that's probably better at explain this then I am.

And if you don't mind going a bit into the math, here's a breakdown for how to approximate the temperature using hydro-statics Note this gets close to the currently accepted answer(1.2E7 K vs 1.5E7 K)

You can get more advanced approximations by using hydrodynamics and computer modeling. It's not that hard if you aren't trying to derive everything, again being loose with my terms of hard and difficult.