Скачать или смотреть How sun formed?

The formation of the Sun is a tale that stretches back billions of years, to a time when our solar system was nothing but a vast, swirling cloud of gas and dust. This is the story of how the Sun came to be.

Around 4.6 billion years ago, in a quiet corner of the Milky Way galaxy, a giant molecular cloud floated in space. This cloud, composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, also contained trace amounts of heavier elements. For millions of years, it drifted undisturbed, until a nearby supernova explosion sent shockwaves rippling through the cloud. These shockwaves triggered regions within the cloud to collapse under their own gravity, forming dense clumps.

One such clump, situated in the heart of the cloud, began to pull in more and more material due to its growing gravitational pull. As the clump grew denser, it heated up, forming a protostar—a young star in the making. This protostar was the early Sun.

Over the course of millions of years, the protostar continued to gather mass from the surrounding cloud, growing hotter and denser at its core. The temperatures in the core eventually soared to around 10 million degrees Celsius, hot enough for nuclear fusion to begin. Hydrogen atoms started to fuse into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of light and heat. This marked the birth of the Sun as a main-sequence star.

The energy produced by nuclear fusion created an outward pressure that balanced the inward pull of gravity, stabilizing the Sun. The surrounding gas and dust were blown away by the intense solar wind, clearing the space around the newborn star. Meanwhile, the remaining material in the surrounding disk began to clump together, forming the planets, moons, asteroids, and other bodies of our solar system.

The Sun has now been shining for about 4.6 billion years, providing the energy necessary for life on Earth. It has witnessed the formation and evolution of its planetary companions, and it will continue to shine for billions of years to come. Eventually, when its fuel runs low, the Sun will undergo dramatic changes, but that is another story for another time. For now, we can marvel at the incredible journey of our stellar companion from a cloud of gas and dust to the magnificent star that lights up our days.