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THE SUN
Where the energy that warms up and illuminates to our planet is produced? The obvious answer is that most of the light and heat come from the Sun; nevertheless, not all the regions of the Sun produce the energy that gives support to the living beings on Earth. The heat (infrared radiation) and the light, in addition to Gamma radiation, X radiation, ultraviolet radiation and an enormous amount of subatomic particles, are released from the core of our star.
The core of the Sun is composed mainly by Hydrogen nuclei (protons), which fuse one to another to form nuclei of deuterium (one proton and one neutron) and tritium (one proton and two neutrons), which are isotopes of Hydrogen, and Helium nuclei (each one is formed by two protons and one neutron) by means of nuclear fusion.
Every time that a thermonuclear reaction happens in the core of the Sun, a great amount of electromagnetic energy is released and emitted from the solar core. This energy goes across the solar layer called radiative zone, then the energy goes through the zone of convection and finally is dispersed out from the star, towards the sidereal space. This energy released from the core of the Sun travels at 186,411.36 mi per second and it is constituted by waves and particles (photons).
The energy released by the thermonuclear reactions departs from the Sun in form of infrared radiation, ultraviolet radiation and visible light. These are the main kinds of electromagnetic energy that reach, in greater or smaller proportion, to all the planets of the Solar System.
When the Sun displays a greater number of flares, the thermonuclear activity in its interior is more intense. The flares are gas jets that usually are associated with sunspots. For that reason, the scientists suppose that the Earth receives a more radiating energy when there are more sunspots on the surface of the Sun.
However, the energy incoming to Earth is more intense when the Sun emits larger amounts of radiative energy from its core and produces gigantic flares not associated with sunspots. For example, in 1998 there were 87 X-Type flares when the number of sunspots was in a low level (see the graph here). That year, the tropospheric temperature fluctuated by 0.52 °C, over the standard temperature. To date, 1998 has been the warmest year of the preceding 200 years.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bakken, G. S., Gates, D. M., Strunk, Thomas H. and Kleiber, Max. Linearized Heat Transfer Relations in Biology. Science. Vol. 183; pp. 976-978. 8 March 1974.
McGrew, Jay L. , Bamford, Frank L and Thomas R. Rehm. Marangoni Flow: An Additional Mechanism in Boiling Heat Transfer. Science. Vol. 153. No. 3740; pp. 1106 - 1107. 2 September 1966.
Potter, Merle C. and Somerton, Craig W. Thermodynamics for Engineers. Mc Graw-Hill. 1993.
Wilson, Jerry D. College Physics-2nd Edition; Prentice Hall Inc. 1994.