What If The Sun Had A Different Colour?
0Comment with a Sun emoji if this happened at least once in your lifetime. 🌞☀️
I’m sure there was a time when your teacher asked the class to draw a picture of the sun. You eagerly grabbed your crayons and started drawing.
And what you drew was a big, round circle colored bright yellow.
Physically speaking, the sun is classified as a yellow star, and we know we wouldn’t be here if it didn’t exist. Scientists have always wondered if the presence of a star like a sun is a necessary condition to develop life as we know it on a planet orbiting around it. But as soon as they started studying exoplanets, they realized there could be a bunch of star-planet configurations with the potential to host extraterrestrial living organisms. For example, GJ 1002 is a relatively cool red dwarf, and its habitable zone — and the two exoplanets orbiting around it — are much closer to it than Earth is to the sun. On the other hand, we know that - in general - it is really hard for life to develop on a random planet around a big blue star. So what would have happened if the sun was of a different color than it actually is, namely if it was a different type of star? Would it be easy for us to live on Earth? But most importantly, would we even be here?
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The Sun’s real colors
First of all, let’s try to understand the Sun’s real colors.
It is yellow, right?. I mean, everybody knows that. Or is it?
What I’m trying to say is…if the sun is yellow, then why is the sunset red, orange, and sometimes even purple? Well, this depends on mainly two factors: our eyes, and the Earth’s atmosphere.
Let’s pretend for a moment we lived in a world without an atmosphere, and to be watching the sun in the sky at three pm during summer.
This means the actual color of the Sun in absence of atmosphere, according to our eyes, would be white. If we take our beautiful atmosphere and consider it in the equation, we would then see it as a yellow, bright disk, as we actually do.
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If the sun was a red star
Well…it depends on what type of red star. According to astronomers, three types of them actually exist red dwarfs, red giants, and red supergiants.
The first ones are way cooler than the Sun and way smaller.
Imagine the Sun is a bright yellow beach ball in the sky, but what if it shrunk down to the size of a tiny red dot? That's what it would look like if we orbited a red dwarf star, the smallest type of star. But don't get too excited, because the lack of heat from the star would cause our world to freeze over.
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If the sun was a blue star
Now let’s change stellar class and imagine a world where the Sun is a bright, dazzling blue star. You step outside and the heat is unlike anything you've ever felt before. It's like stepping into a fiery oven that's hotter than hot. The air is filled with plasma, sizzling and crackling with energy.
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If the sun was a white dwarf
So far, we replaced the sun with red and blue stars, and we were able to tell what would happen in such cases. But these are not the only stars present in the universe. For example, what if the Sun was replaced by a white dwarf?
This is a really interesting question to ask, because…well…after becoming a red giant, the sun will turn into one of these tiny cute white dwarfs.
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If the sun was a neutron star
Now imagine a giant monster with a pull so strong that it's 2 billion times stronger than anything you've ever felt. This monster is called a neutron star and if we replaced the sun with it, the planets in our Solar System would be in big trouble.
If the sun was a black hole
First off, if the sun suddenly turned into a black hole, we would all be toast. It's like if your fave artist suddenly stopped making music - total devastation.
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Credits: Ron Miller, Mark A. Garlick / MarkGarlick.com ,Elon Musk/SpaceX/ Flickr
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00:00 Intro
1:28 The sun's real colors
3:38 rayleigh scattering phenomena
5:30 if the she sun was a red star
7:18 red dwarf stars and Aldebaran
7:40 Mira
8:00 Betelgeuse
8:38 if the sun was a blue star
11:20 if the sun was a white dwarf
13:15 if the sun was a neutron star
14:14 if the sun was a black hole
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