Unveiling the Sun: From Mythical Deity to Nuclear Revelation

Introduction

You know that the sun is a star which is made of hydrogen, its average distance from our earth is 93 million miles that is 150 million kilometres, its light takes eight minutes and 20 seconds to reach our earth and Its existence is essential to sustaining life on our Earth. Without it, there would be no planets in our solar system because its gravity is what keeps the Earth and all the other planets in orbit. Now we know all these things from Aaj's scientific research, but what did people think of this sun 100 years ago and what were their ideas about it? will know

Mythological Beliefs

The sun has been the centre of our mythological world, it has been the most powerful god ruling the sky in some religions and this is the reason why people worshipped it, for example the Greeks called the sun as Helios. Who used to go out early in the morning on his buggy and light up the whole world, and in the same way, in the tribes living in Mexico, in the Egyptian civilizations, and in the Indian civilizations, the sun has been an important god.

Scientific Revolution and Sun's Reality

But then came the golden age of scientific revolution in which some scientists tried to know the reality of the sun with the help of lenses. They believed that if the sun is made of wood or burning with the help of oil, then When should it have gone out, and secondly, if there really is no air in space, then when should the sun's flames have cooled, but it has been burning hotly for thousands of years. Living was surprising and that is why the sun was an important topic of discussion for humans at that time.

Auguste Comte Forecast

To add more excitement to this puzzle, some philosophers also contributed. In 1842, a claim by the French philosopher Auguste Comte caused anxiety among scientists. But one thing she will never know is what the sun and all the other planets are made of? This question was also very logical because the foundation of science is based on experiments, which means that whatever science claims can be repeated and tested in any laboratory, but the problem in the case of the Sun. This is because no part of it can be bottled and brought back to earth for testing as a sample, which is why it was believed at the time that August's comments were correct and that the sun would be a sign for us. The puzzle will continue, and this claim was made by August in his book The Positive Philosophy.

But surprisingly, only a few years after the publication of this book, scientists found out the answer to this riddle and announced that the sun is made of hydrogen.

August was right in his sense but here he made a technical mistake. That is indeed scientific claims can be repeated in the laboratory but it is also a fact that many things in science we can find out directly. Are.

Fraunhofer's Spectrograph

Fraunhofer in the 19th century was the first scientist to use the spectrograph to find out the answer to the millennia-old question, we know that when something is heated it emits light and when that light is passed through a prism. is passed through, then this arc is divided into different colours like Qada, and if you look carefully at these colours, there are black lines in them, these lines are due to heating anything. But the electrons present in it jump from the inner orbit and try to reach the outer orbit now, since the number of electrons in each element is different, due to which these lines are also in different numbers in the light coming out from each element.

It is a kind of fingerprint by which we can find out which element is present in any object and in the same way Fraunhofer and other scientists discovered that the sun is is actually made of hydrogen, Meanwhile, another thing that shocked them was that there was another new element in the sun that we hadn't seen on Earth before.He named this new element Helium (i.e. metal from the Sun). Helium is the only element that was discovered on the Sun, that is, it was not found on Earth until then.

Cosmic Implications

And later further research revealed that helium is not a metal, but a gas, and then Fraunhofer took it from the stars. Vali decided to analyse the light and was surprised to find that the stars contained the same elements that were scattered on Earth, this was the first time that we knew that the cosmic laws applied to the rest of the universe in the same way. are as applicable to our solar system.

Einstein's Theories and Hans Bethe's Research

After Einstein's theories attracted the rest of the world, the American scientist Hans Bethe started research to find out how if the Sun is made of hydrogen, how does it produce so much energy? And then from the research, they realised that due to the immense gravity of the sun, the hydrogen atoms come close to each other and form helium together. It means that a nuclear reaction is going on in the sun and this energy can also be determined through Einstein's equation E=mc².

Conclusion

It was very surprising for the humans that what they considered as gods for thousands of years is actually a nuclear reaction machine hovering above them.

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