What Are The Causes Of Solar Energy?

The sun emits more energy in one second than every human being has used since life on Earth began, according to "A Primer on Solar Energy" in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat on June 17, 2010. The sun's size and temperature, as well as the speed of light, causes a tremendous amount of solar energy to reach the Earth 93 million miles away, as Albert Einstein explained in his theory of relativity. Solar energy is so important that "there would be no life on Earth" without it, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Composition

The sun is composed of gases, which have much higher temperatures than liquids and solids. Most of the sun's gases are helium and hydrogen. The amount of gases is large because the sun's mass is 4.39 nonillion lbs., NASA reports. The sun is 332,900 times larger than Earth.

The sun's "hot ball of glowing gases" is held together by gravity, producing pressure that makes the sun even hotter, according to NASA. Solar energy comes from the sun's core, which is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. The sun's core is the innermost of its six regions. The sun's interior also includes the radiative and convective zones. The surface, or photosphere, is what you see when you look at the sun. Its temperature is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The sun's outermost regions are the chromosphere and the corona. Solar energy moves from the core outward to the two interior zones and then to the surface, the outermost regions and the sun's atmosphere.

Chemical Reactions

The "incredibly high temperatures and pressures" caused by the sun's composition fuel a list of chemical reactions that also contribute to solar energy, according to "Discovering the Universe," an astronomy textbook. The atoms in hydrogen, the first chemical on the Periodic Table of the Elements, fall apart in the sun's core. The central core or nuclei of four atoms are fused into one atom of helium, the second chemical on the Periodic Table.

The four hydrogen nuclei weigh more than the one helium atom; so some of the hydrogen's mass, about 0.7 percent, is not converted into helium. It is, instead, converted into units of energy called photons. This whole process is called thermonuclear fusion. The excess mass is the "m" in Einstein's "E=mc squared" theory of relativity.

Transportation

The solar energy that affects you is caused by a list of processes that move energy from the sun to the Earth. First, the photons slam into electrically charged atoms called electrons and ions in the sun's core. The energy from these collisions causes so much energy that a lot of it is transported outward from the sun's core. This process is called radiation.

It takes millions of years for the radiant energy to move from the sun's core to its surface, but only eight minutes to travel to Earth because the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, according to "A Primer on Solar Energy." Only half of one ten billionth of the energy emitted from the sun reaches the Earth, but the amount that hits the United States daily is enough to "supply the nation's energy needs for one and a half years," reports "A Primer on Solar Energy."