Part 2/12:
Many imagine the Sun as a giant fireball burning with flames, but this isn’t quite accurate. Instead, the Sun glows due to the intense heat generated by nuclear fusion in its core, not chemical combustion like a wood fire. The core's temperature reaches an astonishing 15 million degrees Celsius, where hydrogen nuclei fuse into helium and release enormous amounts of energy. As this energy travels outward, the Sun's surface temperature settles at about 5,500°C, hot enough to melt most metals. To put it in perspective, that’s substantially cooler than a typical fire which burns at around 500°C, yet still incredibly hot.