Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vobebaum. Here. Back in the sixteen hundreds, astronomer Galileo Galilei peered into his telescope and discovered dark spots on the Sun. He subsequently noticed that they seemed to move, vanishing and then returning. He wrote in sixteen thirteen, it is also manifest that their rotation is about the Sun, and though he noted it was possible that the sun spots were moving while the Sun stayed in place, he continued to me, it seems more probable that the movement is of the solar globe than of its surroundings. Galileo had discovered that the Sun, like numerous other celestial objects, rotates on an axis, but the length of time and manner in which the Sun rotates is different than that of a rocky planet such as Earth. That second difference actually causes the Sun spots that originally led to Galileo's discovery. For the article, this episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Clear Raptory, a head of Education and Outreach for the National Solar Observatory, the US Center for Ground Based Solar Physics. She said pretty much, everything in the universe rotates, everything is moving relative to everything else. That is a direct explanation that's accurate and also opened a lot of questions for me. Okay, researchers think that everything in the universe is moving and rotating because they're all exerting gravity on each other. You know, everything's pulling on everything else a little. And because the universe was born with some amount of angular momentum or rotational movement or spin, and angular momentum is a physical property that is conserved. Let's unpack that a little. You've probably encountered Newton's laws of motion, the first of which is that an object in linear motion will stay in motion unless something MUCKs around with it, and the same basic rule applies to angular momentum. Left to its own devices, an object that's spinning is going to keep spinning. These rules are the conservation of momentum. So basically, the Sun rotates on its axis now because everything in the galaxy is rotating around the galaxy center. That includes the clouds of dust and hydrogen gas that the Sun condensed from billions of years ago. Those clouds were also whirling vaguely around day shifting central point. But as the proto Sun gradually gathered mass and developed the gravity that attracted more and more nearby molecules to it, it also conserved that angular momentum or spin, and in the same way that a figure skater can spin faster by tucking their arms in towards their body, the Sun went from a lazy whirl to a relatively quick spin as it gathered mass. The Sun's general rotation isn't difficult to measure because the thin visible solar surface called the photosphere has visible features like sun spots and prominences, some of which last long enough that they can be observed as they move around, just as Galileo did. But from there it gets a little complicated. Remember that the Sun is made up of plasma that is a super hot, electrically charged gas rafter he said, It's not a solid body, so it doesn't rotate as a single solid ball. Instead, the gas rotates more rapidly at the equator than at the poles. A spot at the equator goes around in just about twenty four Earth day, while the polar regions take six whole days longer or more. This is more similar to how Jupiter and the other gas giant planets rotate than the way that Earth or Mars rotates, and this differential rotation is actually what causes sunspots and some other strange and interesting features of the Sun. The Sun's magnetic field, which is generated just below the surface, basically gets wrapped around itself by this uneven motion. The result is development of high density magnetic bands that eventually burst through the surface, causing the eruptions that we see as sunspots and flares. They appear in a regular eleven year cycle called the solar cycle, during which the number of sunspots increases and then decreases again. Beneath the photosphere lies the convection zone, a thick layer where currents of plasma form. It rotates roughly the same is the surface, but deeper inside the Sun. Scientists aren't sure whether other parts, like the radiative zone and the core, move at different rates. A Raftery said, we have some good ideas about this, but it's still an active question. Because scientists can't look into the Sun beneath the photosphere, they instead study how it sounds. A Raftery explained, the inside of the Sun acts almost like a bell. There are sound waves bouncing around inside. To measure these sound waves, the National Solar Observatory uses data collected by its Global Oscillation Network Group or GONG, which is an array of telescopes and other instruments at six different locations around the world, and uses sophisticated mathematics to discern solar vibrations. So will the Sun keep spinning forever? Yep? Basically due to the aforemanvation of angular momentum. About five billion years from now, the Sun will begin to run out of fuel and expand into a red dwarf star, then will collapse into a compact white dwarf and eventually a dense stellar crystal. But even then it will continue to rotate, though at different speeds, because pretty much everything is rotating and always has been. Today's episode is based on the article does the Sun Rotate? On how Stuffworks dot Com? Written by Patrick J. Higer. Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the Aheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vobebaum. Here. Back in the sixteen hundreds, astronomer Galileo Galilei peered into his telescope and discovered dark spots on the Sun. He subsequently noticed that they seemed to move, vanishing and then returning. He wrote in sixteen thirteen, it is also manifest that their rotation is about the Sun, and though he noted it was possible that the sun spots were moving while the Sun stayed in place, he continued to me, it seems more probable that the movement is of the solar globe than of its surroundings. Galileo had discovered that the Sun, like numerous other celestial objects, rotates on an axis, but the length of time and manner in which the Sun rotates is different than that of a rocky planet such as Earth. That second difference actually causes the Sun spots that originally led to Galileo's discovery. For the article, this episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Clear Raptory, a head of Education and Outreach for the National Solar Observatory, the US Center for Ground Based Solar Physics. She said pretty much, everything in the universe rotates, everything is moving relative to everything else. That is a direct explanation that's accurate and also opened a lot of questions for me. Okay, researchers think that everything in the universe is moving and rotating because they're all exerting gravity on each other. You know, everything's pulling on everything else a little. And because the universe was born with some amount of angular momentum or rotational movement or spin, and angular momentum is a physical property that is conserved. Let's unpack that a little. You've probably encountered Newton's laws of motion, the first of which is that an object in linear motion will stay in motion unless something MUCKs around with it, and the same basic rule applies to angular momentum. Left to its own devices, an object that's spinning is going to keep spinning. These rules are the conservation of momentum. So basically, the Sun rotates on its axis now because everything in the galaxy is rotating around the galaxy center. That includes the clouds of dust and hydrogen gas that the Sun condensed from billions of years ago. Those clouds were also whirling vaguely around day shifting central point. But as the proto Sun gradually gathered mass and developed the gravity that attracted more and more nearby molecules to it, it also conserved that angular momentum or spin, and in the same way that a figure skater can spin faster by tucking their arms in towards their body, the Sun went from a lazy whirl to a relatively quick spin as it gathered mass. The Sun's general rotation isn't difficult to measure because the thin visible solar surface called the photosphere has visible features like sun spots and prominences, some of which last long enough that they can be observed as they move around, just as Galileo did. But from there it gets a little complicated. Remember that the Sun is made up of plasma that is a super hot, electrically charged gas rafter he said, It's not a solid body, so it doesn't rotate as a single solid ball. Instead, the gas rotates more rapidly at the equator than at the poles. A spot at the equator goes around in just about twenty four Earth day, while the polar regions take six whole days longer or more. This is more similar to how Jupiter and the other gas giant planets rotate than the way that Earth or Mars rotates, and this differential rotation is actually what causes sunspots and some other strange and interesting features of the Sun. The Sun's magnetic field, which is generated just below the surface, basically gets wrapped around itself by this uneven motion. The result is development of high density magnetic bands that eventually burst through the surface, causing the eruptions that we see as sunspots and flares. They appear in a regular eleven year cycle called the solar cycle, during which the number of sunspots increases and then decreases again. Beneath the photosphere lies the convection zone, a thick layer where currents of plasma form. It rotates roughly the same is the surface, but deeper inside the Sun. Scientists aren't sure whether other parts, like the radiative zone and the core, move at different rates. A Raftery said, we have some good ideas about this, but it's still an active question. Because scientists can't look into the Sun beneath the photosphere, they instead study how it sounds. A Raftery explained, the inside of the Sun acts almost like a bell. There are sound waves bouncing around inside. To measure these sound waves, the National Solar Observatory uses data collected by its Global Oscillation Network Group or GONG, which is an array of telescopes and other instruments at six different locations around the world, and uses sophisticated mathematics to discern solar vibrations. So will the Sun keep spinning forever? Yep? Basically due to the aforemanvation of angular momentum. About five billion years from now, the Sun will begin to run out of fuel and expand into a red dwarf star, then will collapse into a compact white dwarf and eventually a dense stellar crystal. But even then it will continue to rotate, though at different speeds, because pretty much everything is rotating and always has been. Today's episode is based on the article does the Sun Rotate? On how Stuffworks dot Com? Written by Patrick J. Higer. Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the Aheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.