Experiment 9

Sun as a Star

Which one of the images above is our Sun?

They are, of course, all images of our Sun and they were all taken on the same day. The one on
the upper left is an image taken in visible light. The sunspots on the surface can clearly be seen.
The image in the upper right is a magnetogram. This image shows regions of magnetic field.
Magnetic fields coming out of the Sun are white and magnetic fields going back into the Sun are
shown as black.

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Can you see any correlation between the sunspots and magnetic fields?

The image in the lower left shows only light emitted by iron that has gotten so hot that not only
has it melted, heated to a gas, but has also lost 14 of its electrons as well! The light given off is in
the ultraviolet, too energetic for your eye to see. The last image shows even hotter material that
is emitting in X-rays. Each image looks different from the last but can you see any similarities?

Sunspot Structure

Details show the black

umbra, the heart of
the sunspot,
surrounded by the
lighter penumbra.

The surrounding
background structure
is called granulation.
These are the tops of
plasma cells that
bubble to the solar
surface carrying
energy via the process
called convection.

The Earth is to scale.

New data, like the images on the previous page, show that the Sun is a dynamic structure with
many different layers, each of which behaves in different ways. Considering how important the
Sun is to life on Earth (i.e. without the Sun there would be no life) and how small changes in the
Sun can cause drastic changes in our fragile biosphere, it is easy to see why the study of our Sun
has expanded to include dozens of satellites and ground based observatories, and thousands of
scientists from many different countries.

Activity I: – Solar Rotation

In this Activity you will be investigating one of the most prominent features of our dynamic Sun,
SUNSPOTS. You will take measurements of the sizes of different sunspots and see how they
change over time. The images you will be using are real data from the SOHO (Solar
Heliospheric Observatory) satellite.

First we are going to measure the angular velocity of different sunspot groups. When things
move in a circle they have a certain amount of angular velocity. What you normally think of as

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velocity is the amount of time it takes an object to move a certain distance. Angular velocity is
similar but measures the amount of time it takes an object to move through an angle. The
formula for angular velocity is given below:
𝐷𝑒𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑑
𝐴𝑛𝑔𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟 𝑣𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑦 =
𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒

For example if you had an object that completed one full circle in an hour then it’s angular
velocity would be:
360𝑜
= 1 𝐻𝑜𝑢𝑟 or 360° per hour (since a circle contains 360 degrees).

You can covert this into degrees per minute by using the following:

360𝑜 1 𝐻𝑜𝑢𝑟 360𝑜 6𝑜

. = =
1 𝐻𝑜𝑢𝑟 60 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑠 60 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑠 1 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑡𝑒

This process of unit conversion should be familiar to you now. It uses the fact that for every one
hour there are 60 minutes and that if you have hours on the top and bottom of an equation they
cancel out. When you have numbers on the bottom of a fraction that means to divide

1. Take the transparency on your desk and look at it. It is marked with solar latitude (up and
down) and longitude (left and right) lines. You will use these lines to determine the positions
of sunspots on different pictures.

2. Look at the visible light images on your table. Each one should have a date on it. Put these in
order from the first date to the last and then put the transparency over the first one. On your
answer sheet, in the first table, mark the date of the image, the longitude and latitude of the
largest sunspot. Use the ruler to measure the size of the sunspot in centimeters.

3. Choose two additional large sunspots and list their properties in the tables provided. You
may want to name each one so that you don’t get them confused later on.

4. Repeat the above for each date. For every date, except the first one, record how many
degrees the sunspot is moved in longitude from the previous day. (ex. Absolute value of
today’s longitude – yesterday’s longitude)

5. Once you have filled out the tables for the sunspots in your images you can start answering
the questions. Compute the average angular velocity by taking the total degrees moved and
divide it by the number of days it took to move that far.

6. Question 5 is self-explanatory. Question 6 requires you to average all of the velocities of

your sunspots.

7. Using the answer from question 6 you can determine about how long it takes the Sun to
complete one rotation. Remember: time=distance / velocity and there are 360° in a circle.

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Activity II – Sunspot Size
In this activity you will use the data collected to measure the size of the largest sunspot that you
have recorded.

1. Write the size of the largest sunspot that you measured, in cm, for question #1.

2. Measure the size of the Sun and put your measurement in question #2

3. Now we need to create a conversion factor to change from cm on the image to actual miles.

The first thing we need is the actual size of the Sun in miles, which is provided in part 3

4. Follow the directions on the answer sheet to give you a conversion factor. Be sure to put the
units of the conversion factor in your answer.

5. Multiply your measurement of the sunspot to get its actual size in miles.

6. Follow the directions on the answer sheet to compare the size of the sunspot to the size of the
Earth. A value of one means that they are the same size, value of less than one means that the
sunspot is smaller, a value greater than one means the sunspot is larger than the Earth.

Activity III – Solar Energy Flow

All life on earth originates from the flow of
energy out of the Sun. This energy provides
plants, animals, and us with light and food.
Some of the light energy within the Sun can
take a million years to actually exit the body of
the Sun. This Activity is designed to introduce
you to how light produced in the Sun’s core
travels to the surface and how this light, made
up of photons, interacts with matter on its way
out into space.

Photons interact in two general regions of the Sun – the interior and the atmosphere. The photons
generated in the core of the Sun travel through the solar interior in what is called a random walk
pattern. This random walk is a zigzag pattern produce by photons being scattered around by
particles in the Sun. The solar atmosphere is the outer layer of gas, which is much less dense than
the interior. It consists of three main layers called the photosphere, the chromosphere and the
corona. However, some photons are absorbed by atoms in the atmosphere and then re-emitted in
some random direction. This produces absorption lines in the Sun’s spectrum, which appear as
dark lines on a bright background.

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The CLEA computer program will demonstrate the processes occurring in each of the above-
mentioned regions of the Sun and hopefully give you a better understanding of what is
happening to photons in each region. Before you start though, you should be familiar with the
conditions under which the different types of spectra occur. These are summarized in what are
called Kirchhoff’s Laws:

Law 1 --- A hot object or hot, dense gas produces a continuous spectrum in which emission
appears at all wavelengths. This is a complete “rainbow” of colors without any spectral lines.

Law 2 --- A thin gas seen against a cooler background produces an emission line spectrum. This
is a series of bright spectral lines seen against a dark background.

Law 3 --- A thin gas in front of a hotter, continuous source of light produces an absorption line
spectrum. This is a series of dark spectral lines among a continuous background.

The Sun’s surface emits a continuous spectrum, but there is a cooler thin layer of gas between
the Sun and you. It is the solar atmosphere. Kirchhoff’s third law then explains why you see an
absorption line spectrum.

This Activity is split into two major components: The Solar Interior and The Solar Atmosphere.
These two major components will be subdivided as well. Read the accompanying material for
each subdivision, then perform the lab exercise, and answer the questions for each subdivision.
Then move to the next subdivision.

The Solar Interior

A. In this part of the lab you will see how a photon (a particle of light) tries to escape from the
center of the Sun. The interior of the Sun is a hot dense gas and as a photon makes its way

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 outward, different mechanisms affect its path. The basic result from the different mechanisms
is essentially the same: every time a photon interacts with matter, it is re-directed in a new
and random direction producing the zigzag pattern called a random walk. The Sun is
composed of layers upon layers of atoms, and the number of layers, n, affects the amount of
time it takes for the photon to escape the Sun. In this exercise you will see why it can take so
long for a photon to escape the Sun.

1. Double Click on CLEA_SUN Software.

i. Click on File on the top menu,
1. Select Login and Fill out your group’s information here.
2. Click OK.

2. Click on Simulation on the top menu

i. Select FLOW,
ii. Select 1 PHOTON

A new window would pop-up

3. Click on Parameters (on the top menu of the new window)

i. Select # OF LAYERS,
ii. set to 10 and click OK)

4. To start the simulation, press the RUN SIMULATION button.

5. Record the number of interactions the photon had in the data table. Repeat two more
times.

6. Calculate the average.

7. Repeat steps 4-6 for layers of 20, 30, and 40 layers and record your results.

8. Answer the questions for The Solar Interior-Part A.

9. Exit the Flow simulation by hitting RETURN

You just watched a single photon escape from the Sun. The process was a statistical one and you
had to repeat the experiment a few times to determine an estimate in the average number of
interactions a photon experienced to make it to the surface. Answer questions 1 & 2 on the
worksheet. In the next part of the lab, you will watch several photons simultaneously try to make
their way out of the Sun.

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B. Next, you release 1 to 1000 photons at the same time from the center and watch as they
collectively make their trip to the surface. This illustrates the phenomenon called diffusion,
which is basically (as applied to the Sun) the “leakage” of photons through the solar interior.
You can get a reliable estimate of how many interactions occur for a photon as it makes its
way through n layers to the surface. It takes less time than running the earlier experiment
many times.

1. Again Click on Simulation

a. Select Flow
b. Select Diffusion
To bring up a model image of the solar interior.

2. To Assign the number of layers Click on Parameters

a. Select # OF LAYERS,
b. set to 30, and click OK)

3. To Assign a number of photons Click on Parameters:

a. Select # OF PULSE PHOTONS,
b. set to 100, and click OK)

4. To start the simulation, press the RUN SIMULATION button.

5. Record the number of interactions each photon experienced before it reached the surface
on your data sheet and answer all the questions for The Solar Interior-Part B.

6. Exit the Flow simulation by hitting RETURN

Answer questions 3 & 4 on the worksheet.

The Solar Atmosphere

A. Now we move outward to the Solar Atmosphere. In this portion of the experiment you will
run a simulation showing you how photons and atoms interact. The gases of the solar
atmosphere are made up of atoms with a nucleus and electron orbits/clouds. The photons
emitted from the solar interior interact with this gas. In this simulation you will see that there
can be two types of photons interacting with the atoms of the gas: Line Photons and
Continuum Photons. Line photons have exactly the right energy to be absorbed by the atoms.
They are held for a brief period of time and then set free again-into a random direction.

Continuum photons do not have the right amount of energy to interact easily with the atoms.
Therefore they mostly pass through the gas without interacting at all. Occasionally a
continuum photon may scatter off an electron.

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 1. Select a simulation for photon-atom interaction: (SIMULATION, INTERACTION,
PHOTON TYPE, LINE)

2. Simulate an interaction for 20 photons (You will want to stop the process after the
number of photons emitted equals 20): (RUN…..STOP)

3. Record the number of scattered photons on your answer sheet.

4. Repeat the experiment for 20 Continuum Photons: (PHOTON TYPE, CONTINUUM,

RUN…STOP)

5. Record your results and hit RETURN.

Answer questions 5 & 6 on the worksheet.

B. Now that you have seen the basic concept of how photons interact with atoms, let’s go a step
further and see how this can lead to spectral line formation. In this simulation, photons are
sent through a cloud of gas. The photons enter the cloud from the left after being emitted by a
source like the Sun. There is a detector on the right for you to try and detect the photons.
With this setup, you are viewing the “Sun” through this cloud of gas. In this scenario you
will be sending line photons through the gas. They get their name from the fact that they are
responsible for the lines in a spectrum. As photons pass through the cloud they may interact
with the atoms in the gas. If the photon makes it through the cloud and is picked up by your
detector, you will see the detector record this. However the photon may interact and get
redirected in a direction such that your detector will not record it. In this case it is counted as
non-detection.
1. Simulate an aspect of line formation for line photons: (SIMULATION, LINE
FORMATION.)

2. Start the simulation (PARAMETERS, # OF PHOTONS, set to 20, OK, RUN.)

3. Record your results and hit RETURN

Answer questions 7 & 8 on the worksheet.

C. Continuum photons give rise to the continuous rainbow of colors in a spectrum. This time the
program will send photons through the gas cloud, which have various energies and do not
easily interact with the electrons of the gas, except the occasional scattering. Most photons,
therefore, pass right through the gas without interacting.

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 1. Send Continuum photons through the gas: (SIMULATION, CONTINUUM.)

2. Start the simulation (PARAMETERS, # OF PHOTONS, set to 20, OK, RUN.)

3. Record your results and hit RETURN

Answer question 9 on the worksheet.

This next section relates to experiments that are beyond the scope of this class. However, it is
beneficial to explain a few concepts briefly; The Sun’s atmosphere contains certain gases. These
gases can absorb photons if they have a certain amount of energy. The photons that are absorbed
by a particular gas are the Line Photons mentioned previously. The photons that are not absorbed
by that particular gas are the Continuum Photons. Each has certain amounts of energy that
correspond to a certain wavelength. And……Wavelength corresponds to COLOR.

Answer question 10 on the worksheet.

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Name: _________________________________________ Date: _____________________

Partner 1: _____________________________________ Partner 2: __________________

Day Date Latitude Longitude Longitude Measured

Difference Size (cm)
1 0
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

Day Date Latitude Longitude Longitude Measured

Difference Size (cm)
1 0
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

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Name: _________________________________________ Date: _____________________

Partner 1: _____________________________________ Partner 2: __________________

Day Date Latitude Longitude Longitude Measured

Difference Size (cm)

1 0
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

1. Angular velocity of sunspot #1 (degrees/day) _________________________________

2. Angular velocity of sunspot #2 (degrees/day) _________________________________

3. Angular velocity of sunspot #3 (degrees/day) _________________________________

4. Are all of the angular velocities the same? _________________________________

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 Why or why not? _________________________________

5. Average angular velocity of all sunspots _________________________________

6. Sun’s average rotation period _________________________________

Activity II – Sunspot Size

1. Size of the largest sunspot in cm =_________________________________

2. Size of the Sun in cm =_________________________________

3. Actual diameter of the Sun is 864,972 miles (give or take). Calculate a conversion factor
(𝐴𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙 𝑆𝑖𝑧𝑒⁄𝐼𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑒 𝑆𝑖𝑧𝑒) =_________________________________

4. Actual diameter of the sunspot =_________________________________

𝑆𝑢𝑛𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑡 𝑆𝑖𝑧𝑒⁄
5. Compare to the diameter of the Earth( 7937 𝑚𝑖𝑙𝑒𝑠)

=_________________________________

Activity III – Solar Energy Flow

The Solar Interior

Trial 10 layers 20 layers 30 layers 40 layers

1 Interactions #:
2 Interactions #:
3 Interactions #:

Average:

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Plot your values for the average number of interactions. Make the X-axis (horizontal) the number
of layers and make your Y-axis (vertical) the number of interactions.

1. Sketch a best-fit line for your data points (should it be straight or curved?) A straight line is a
linear function, and a curved line is an exponential function. Is the relationship between layers of
atoms and photon interactions linear or exponential? ___________________________________

The letter n = the number of layers of atoms. Fill out the table by calculating the theoretical
2
value of interactions, n , and your values for the average number of interactions per layer.

n 10 20 30 40
N squared
Your average

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 2
2. How do your averages compare with the calculated values of n ? Why are they off?

___________________________________________________________________________

3. What was the average number of interactions a photon experienced before it reached the
surface?_________________________________________________________

4. How does this compare with (a) your average interactions for 30 layers from before? (b) the
theoretical value?
_______________________________________________________________

The Solar Atmosphere

5. How many line photons were scattered? _______________________________

6. How many continuum photons were scattered? __________________________

7. What type of spectrum should you expect to see? (Hint: look at figure 2)

______________________________________

8. Of the 20 line photons sent, what percentage was detected? _________________

9. Of the continuum photons sent, what percentage was detected? _______________

10. Construct your own absorption spectrum for the

Sun. If we know that the gases in the Sun absorb # of photons
photons at only certain amounts of energy, then the Energy Wavelength detected
absorption spectrum will have dark lines for colors 1.5 ev 828 nm 14
that correspond to those energies. The following 1.9 ev 654 nm 0
table shows the recorded number of detected
photons for a simulation of 20 photon emissions for 2.3 ev 540 nm 13
each wavelength. 2.5 ev 497 nm 13
2.6 ev 478 nm 0
Which wavelengths would be missing in your
2.7 ev 460 nm 15
absorption spectrum?
____________________________________ 2.9 ev 428 nm 0
____________________________________ 3.1 ev 401 nm 15

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