# What is the Sun?

An episode of [Science for Kids / Science's Not Boring: The Kids Science Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1896928296), 25 Aug 2026, 12 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2624612/episodes/19663785-what-is-the-sun.mp3

Have you ever looked up at the daytime sky and wondered, what exactly is the Sun? It might look like a friendly, quiet yellow ball, but it is actually a roaring, boiling nuclear furnace! Join Mira and Finn on an explosive space adventure to the center of our solar system as they uncover the mind-blowing secrets of the closest star to Earth. Did you know you could fit over a million Earths inside it? Or that it is made of a glowing, electrified soup called plasma? In this fiery episode, we will discover how the Sun violently smashes atoms together to create the brilliant light and heat that keeps us alive! You'll also learn about a super-fast spaceship built by scientists to actually touch the Sun without melting. But hold on tight, because things get dark! We are answering the ultimate terrifying question: what would happen if the Sun suddenly switched off completely? From absolute darkness to a freezing planet flying off into deep space, the answers will shock you! Grab your sunglasses and tune in!

## Transcript

[0:00] SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Science Is Not Boring by Kidopoly.com.
[0:04] SPEAKER_00: I'm Mira.
[0:05] SPEAKER_00: And I'm Finn.
[0:06] SPEAKER_00: Before we jump in, a massive shout out to Raphael, who is seven and a half, and Audrey, who is five.
[0:13] SPEAKER_01: They live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and they listen every single day on the way to camp.
[0:19] SPEAKER_00: This episode is dedicated to the two of you.
[0:22] SPEAKER_00: We hope you're feeling the warm sunshine on your way to camp right now.
[0:26] SPEAKER_01: Sunshine?
[0:27] SPEAKER_01: Wait, does that mean we're talking about the sun today?
[0:31] SPEAKER_00: We sure are.
[0:32] SPEAKER_00: But Finn, did you know that the sun isn't just a friendly, quiet yellow ball in the sky?
[0:38] SPEAKER_01: It's not.
[0:39] SPEAKER_01: It looks pretty peaceful from down here, especially when you're just drawing it with a yellow crayon.
[0:44] SPEAKER_00: Nope, the real sun is chaotic.
[0:47] SPEAKER_00: It's actually a roaring, boiling nuclear furnace.
[0:51] SPEAKER_00: And every single second, it destroys a mountain-sized amount of its own mass to create the brilliant light we see.
[0:59] SPEAKER_01: Wait, it's destroying itself right now, while we're standing here talking about it.
[1:04] SPEAKER_00: Exactly! It's been doing it for four and a half billion years.
[1:09] SPEAKER_00: Today we're exploring exactly how the sun makes its heat, how unbelievably huge it really is, and what would happen to our entire planet if it ever just switched off completely.
[1:21] SPEAKER_01: Switched off?
[1:22] SPEAKER_01: That sounds terrifying, but I really want to know.
[1:25] SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's start with the absolute basics.
[1:28] SPEAKER_01: What exactly is the sun?
[1:30] SPEAKER_00: It's a star, just like the tiny twinkling ones you see at night, but it's much closer to us.
[1:36] SPEAKER_00: It's a giant spinning ball of super hot gas called plasma.
[1:41] SPEAKER_00: What exactly is plasma?
[1:42] SPEAKER_00: I've never heard of that.
[1:44] SPEAKER_00: It's the fourth state of matter.
[1:46] SPEAKER_00: If you heat a gas up so much that its atoms actually break apart, it turns into a glowing, electrified soup.
[1:54] SPEAKER_00: That's what makes the sun so magnetic and stormy.
[1:57] SPEAKER_00: Wait, if it's just glowing plasma, could you fly a spaceship straight through it?
[2:02] SPEAKER_00: Definitely not.
[2:04] SPEAKER_00: Even though it's not solid rock like Earth, the gravity is so intense that the plasma is incredibly thick and heavy, and it's unimaginably hot.
[2:14] SPEAKER_00: How hot are we talking?
[2:15] SPEAKER_00: Like the inside of a pizza oven.
[2:18] SPEAKER_00: Way hotter.
[2:20] SPEAKER_00: The surface of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
[2:24] SPEAKER_00: But if you travel all the way down into its core, it's 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.
[2:30] SPEAKER_00: 27 million?
[2:31] SPEAKER_00: That's impossible to even imagine.
[2:34] SPEAKER_00: I know, and its size is just as wild.
[2:37] SPEAKER_00: If the sun was a giant hollow jar, you could fit 1.3 million earths inside it.
[2:44] SPEAKER_01: 1.3 million earths?
[2:46] SPEAKER_01: That makes us sound incredibly tiny.
[2:48] SPEAKER_00: We really are.
[2:50] SPEAKER_00: The sun is about 93 million miles away from us.
[2:54] SPEAKER_00: That sounds super far away.
[2:55] SPEAKER_00: How does its heat and light even reach us?
[2:58] SPEAKER_00: Light is the fastest thing in the entire universe.
[3:02] SPEAKER_00: Even though the sun is millions of miles away, the sunlight shoots across the cold, empty solar system and reaches Earth in just 8 minutes and 20 seconds.
[3:12] SPEAKER_01: So the sunlight hitting my face right now actually left the sun over eight minutes ago.
[3:17] SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
[3:18] SPEAKER_00: It travels at the speed of light to warm your skin.
[3:21] SPEAKER_00: But the craziest part is how that intense light gets made in the first place.
[3:26] SPEAKER_01: Right.
[3:26] SPEAKER_01: You mentioned it's a nuclear furnace and it destroys a mountain.
[3:30] SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
[3:32] SPEAKER_00: Deep inside the sun's core, the crushing gravity is so extreme that it actually smashes hydrogen atoms together until they fuse and stick.
[3:42] SPEAKER_00: It's a process called nuclear fusion.
[3:45] SPEAKER_00: Smash together?
[3:46] SPEAKER_00: That sounds pretty violent.
[3:48] SPEAKER_00: Oh, it is.
[3:49] SPEAKER_00: Every single second, the sun smashes 600 million tons of hydrogen together.
[3:56] SPEAKER_00: 600 million tonnes?
[3:58] SPEAKER_00: Every single second?
[4:00] SPEAKER_00: Yep.
[4:01] SPEAKER_00: And here is the wildly explosive part.
[4:04] SPEAKER_00: When those atoms smash together, a tiny bit of their matter is lost.
[4:09] SPEAKER_00: About 4 million tons of it completely vanishes into pure energy.
[4:15] SPEAKER_00: 4 million tons?
[4:17] SPEAKER_00: Is that the mountain you were talking about?
[4:19] SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
[4:20] SPEAKER_00: Imagine a gigantic rocky mountain turning into blinding light and heat in the blink of an eye, over and over again.
[4:30] SPEAKER_00: That violent, fiery energy is the only reason we have wind, weather, and life on Earth.
[4:37] SPEAKER_01: But wait, if it makes that light deep in the centre, how does it get all the way out to space?
[4:43] SPEAKER_00: It's like a microscopic pinball machine.
[4:46] SPEAKER_00: The energy bounces around, bumping into atoms over and over again in a zigzag path.
[4:53] SPEAKER_00: Because the core is so dense, it takes thousands of years for one single photon of light to finally escape from the sun's surface.
[5:03] SPEAKER_01: So the sunlight keeping us warm today, or the light shining on Raphael and Audrey on their way to camp, was actually born inside the sun thousands of years ago.
[5:13] SPEAKER_01: That is absolutely unbelievable.
[5:15] SPEAKER_00: It really is! And scientists wanted to understand this gigantic furnace so badly that they actually sent a spaceship to go touch the sun.
[5:25] SPEAKER_00: Touch the sun?
[5:26] SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't it melt instantly?
[5:29] SPEAKER_00: You'd think so.
[5:30] SPEAKER_00: But in 2018, NASA launched the Parker solar probe.
[5:35] SPEAKER_00: It was named after a brilliant astrophysicist named Dr.
[5:38] SPEAKER_00: Eugene Parker, who studied the solar wind back in the 1950s.
[5:43] SPEAKER_01: How close did this probe actually get?
[5:46] SPEAKER_00: It flew just 3.8 million miles above the sun's surface.
[5:51] SPEAKER_00: In space terms, that is practically skimming the fire.
[5:55] SPEAKER_01: Wow.
[5:55] SPEAKER_01: But seriously, how did it survive that insane heat?
[5:59] SPEAKER_00: It uses a revolutionary heat shield.
[6:02] SPEAKER_00: The front of the shield was glowing red hot at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, but the scientific instruments hiding safely behind it stayed at normal room temperature.
[6:14] SPEAKER_01: No way! What are the scientific instruments looking for behind that shield?
[6:19] SPEAKER_00: They study the solar wind and how the sun burps out massive, dangerous clouds of plasma called coronal mass ejections.
[6:27] SPEAKER_00: If one of those huge magnetic storms hits Earth, it can completely knock out our satellites, the internet, and our power grids.
[6:36] SPEAKER_00: So we really need to learn how to predict them.
[6:38] SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
[6:40] SPEAKER_01: But wouldn't the sun's huge gravity pull the probe in and destroy it?
[6:44] SPEAKER_00: Not if it moves fast enough.
[6:46] SPEAKER_00: It's the fastest human-made object in history, zipping around at 430,000 miles per hour.
[6:54] SPEAKER_00: How fast is that for people on Earth?
[6:56] SPEAKER_00: It's fast enough to fly all the way across the entire United States in just 20 seconds.
[7:03] SPEAKER_01: Okay, that is ridiculously fast.
[7:06] SPEAKER_01: I guess you have to be fast if you're hanging out near a star.
[7:09] SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the sun is huge, hot, and powerful.
[7:15] SPEAKER_01: But what if.
[7:16] SPEAKER_01: what if it just suddenly went out?
[7:19] SPEAKER_01: Like switching off a light bulb.
[7:22] SPEAKER_00: Oh, things would get very bad, very quickly.
[7:25] SPEAKER_01: But not right away.
[7:27] SPEAKER_01: Remember how long it takes light to reach us?
[7:30] SPEAKER_01: Eight minutes and twenty seconds.
[7:33] SPEAKER_00: Right.
[7:34] SPEAKER_00: Because nothing can travel faster than light, for those first eight minutes, we wouldn't even know anything had happened.
[7:41] SPEAKER_00: The sky would look totally normal.
[7:43] SPEAKER_00: And then what happens?
[7:46] SPEAKER_00: And then absolute terrifying darkness.
[7:50] SPEAKER_00: The stars would come out in the middle of the day, but the moon would vanish instantly.
[7:56] SPEAKER_00: Because the moon only shines by reflecting the sun's brilliant light.
[8:01] SPEAKER_00: Wait, what about gravity?
[8:03] SPEAKER_00: Would we just float away?
[8:05] SPEAKER_00: We wouldn't float off the ground, but the whole planet would.
[8:09] SPEAKER_00: Without the sun's massive gravity holding us in orbit, Earth would fly off in a straight line into deep, dark space at 67,000 miles per hour.
[8:21] SPEAKER_00: What about the plants?
[8:23] SPEAKER_00: Without sunlight, they can't make food.
[8:26] SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
[8:27] SPEAKER_00: Photosynthesis would stop immediately.
[8:30] SPEAKER_00: Within weeks, the entire food chain would collapse.
[8:34] SPEAKER_01: And we'd freeze, right?
[8:35] SPEAKER_01: Like an eternal winter.
[8:37] SPEAKER_00: Yes, and very fast.
[8:40] SPEAKER_00: Within just one week, the average global temperature would plunge below zero degrees Fahrenheit.
[8:46] SPEAKER_00: Within a year, it would drop to a deadly minus 100 degrees.
[8:51] SPEAKER_00: Would anything survive at all?
[8:53] SPEAKER_00: The entire surface of the oceans would become thick, solid ice.
[8:58] SPEAKER_00: But deep, deep down near boiling underwater volcanoes, tiny microbes might survive in the dark for thousands of years.
[9:07] SPEAKER_00: It just goes to show how delicately balanced our existence really is.
[9:12] SPEAKER_00: Alright Finn, time for the quiz! Are you ready?
[9:15] SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm ready.
[9:17] SPEAKER_01: Hit me with the facts.
[9:19] SPEAKER_00: First question.
[9:20] SPEAKER_00: How many Earths could fit inside the Sun?
[9:26] SPEAKER_00: Next one.
[9:27] SPEAKER_00: What is the blistering temperature of the Sun's core in degrees Fahrenheit?
[9:36] SPEAKER_00: Question three.
[9:37] SPEAKER_00: How fast does the Parker solar probe travel in miles per hour?
[9:45] SPEAKER_00: Here's number four.
[9:46] SPEAKER_00: Exactly how long does it take for the sun's light to reach Earth?
[9:54] SPEAKER_00: Last question.
[9:55] SPEAKER_00: How many tons of mass does the sun convert into pure energy every single second?
[10:05] SPEAKER_00: Great job! Let's see how you did.
[10:08] SPEAKER_00: The first answer is 1.3 million Earths can fit inside the Sun.
[10:13] SPEAKER_00: For question 2, the Sun's core is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.
[10:19] SPEAKER_00: Number three, the answer is the Parker solar probe travels at 430,000 miles per hour.
[10:28] SPEAKER_00: Question 4.
[10:29] SPEAKER_00: It takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for sunlight to reach us.
[10:34] SPEAKER_00: And the final answer is the sun turns 4 million tons of mass into energy every second.
[10:42] SPEAKER_01: Wow.
[10:43] SPEAKER_01: After hearing what would happen if it went out, I am so incredibly glad the sun is still burning brightly.
[10:50] SPEAKER_00: Me too.
[10:51] SPEAKER_00: Luckily, scientists say the sun has enough hydrogen fuel in its core to keep burning brightly for about 5 billion more years.
[11:00] SPEAKER_00: So we absolutely do not need to worry anytime soon.
[11:04] SPEAKER_01: That is definitely a massive relief.
[11:07] SPEAKER_01: It really is the ultimate engine, keeping us all alive and warm.
[11:11] SPEAKER_00: If you love learning about our amazing sun, the speedy Parker solar probe, and what would happen if the lights went out, please leave us a five-star review.
[11:21] SPEAKER_00: Just pull out your device, scroll down on your podcast app, and tap those five shiny stars.
[11:28] SPEAKER_01: Oh, and don't forget to head over to our site, kidopoly.com.
[11:32] SPEAKER_01: We've got tons of fun learning games, puzzles, and cool activities there to explore after you finish listening.
[11:39] SPEAKER_00: And if you want a shout out on the show, or just want to say hi and tell us your favourite space fact, send us an email at hello at kidopoly.com.
[11:49] SPEAKER_01: We absolutely love hearing from you guys.
[11:51] SPEAKER_01: It makes our day.
[11:53] SPEAKER_00: Thanks for exploring the wild extremes of the solar system with us today.
[11:57] SPEAKER_00: See you next time on Science Is Not Boring.
[12:00] SPEAKER_00: Bye everyone.
[12:02] SPEAKER_00: Stay warm.

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