ESSAY: THE SUN

The glorious sun stays in his course and plays the alchemist,

Turning with splendor of his precious eye

The meager cloddy earth to glittering gold. – Shakespeare (King John)

We see it almost every day, seldom consciously aware of the enormous role it plays in our daily life. We are grateful for the light it provides, but for it we would be plunged in pitch darkness; even the silvery moon would shine no more, nor any planet be visible. Our sky is blue only because sunlight is scattered by air molecules.

Among the few things of which we can be reasonably certain is sunrise tomorrow, whether it is brightly visible or hidden in a cloudy eastern sky.

Our distant ancestors did not know of chlorophyll and photosynthesis, much less about ultra-violet and infrared, but they realized that the Sun plays an important role in our lives. Therefore, it was deified in many cultures: the highest honor for any entity. Sun-Gods came to be called by different names: Ra by Egyptians, Apollo by the Greeks, Surya by Hindus, Utu by Sumerians, Mithra by Iranians, Sol Invictus by Romans, Sunna by the Norse. In ancient Rome, December 25 was celebrated as the Sun’s Birthday. In Teotihuacán (Mexico), there is a majestic structure called Pyramid of the Sun which, they say, dates back to the first century C. E. In Konarak (India), there still stands a 11th century temple dedicated to the Sun. The Pharaoh Akhnaten established Middle-Eastern monotheism by making the Sun the only God, and set the example of persecuting all who did not subscribe to his God.

Soon after my spiritual initiation in the Hindu tradition, I learned to pay homage to the Sun by doing a formal prostration (súrya-namaskáram) at dawn, facing the East and chanting the sacred Gayatri mantra:

Aum bhur bhuvah suvaha

Tut-savitur Varenyam

Bhargo d”evāsya Dheemahi

Dhiyó yónah prachodayāt

We meditate on that most adored Supreme Lord,

The creator, whose effulgence (divine light) illumines

All realms (physical, mental and spiritual).

May this divine light illumine our intellect.

In ages when poetry and prayer dominated our appreciation of the natural world, thinkers did not see any need to delve into or imagine processes by which the Sun was formed. To those who viewed the world as the work of a Master Creator, Sun and stars were lit in the lightless Void by the Creator simply by uttering Fiat Lux! (Let there be Light!).

Then emerged the age when reflection on Creation was replaced by explanations of phenomena. How did the Sun and stars come to be, what causes the rainbow, why do bodies fall on earth? This led to the understanding of star-formation by the slow accumulation of enormous quantities of hydrogen, their gradual compression over the eons causing a steady rise of temperature at the core, until at last it becomes hot enough for nuclear reactions to set in. The dark massive mammoth begins to glow, spilling out enormous amounts of radiation. That is how, per our current understanding of matter and processes in the world, stars are/were born. Those twinkling little stars were not set up overnight, but emerged ever so slowly with the patient passage of time.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, a prize was offered by the French Academy of Sciences to anyone who could determine the temperature of the sun. Just reflecting on the problem should raise our awareness of the power of the scientific quest. Standing here on planet earth, we propose to measure the temperature of the hot sun ninety-three million miles away by simply measuring the wavelengths of solar radiation. Estimates ranged from 1500o C 10,000o C.

How was this done? Studies by physicists in the last decades of the 19th century revealed that the intensity of radiant heat depends in mathematically precise ways on the temperature of the radiation-emitting surface. This finding is of enormous import. With it we can measure the temperature of bodies we cannot touch. By measuring the wavelengths of the radiation emitted by it we can measure the temperature of a blast furnace, without inserting a thermometer into it. Josef Stefan, using the data collected by previous experimenters, and applying his own formula relating radiation intensity to the temperature of the source, calculated the (currently accepted) value of 000 o C for the temperature of the sun.

Aside from its surface temperature, the Sun has other fantastic properties. The periodic sunspots, now known to be related to its magnetic field, have been known for a long time. The incessant flow of plasma called solar wind occasionally becomes turbulent and it spews out electrically charged particles, some of which cause the Northern Lights. These were unknown to generations before the scientific era, just as we have no inkling of what discoveries yet to be made will inform future generations.

Last year (2019), NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which had been launched in August 2018, revealed, among other things, that our central star, which is perpetually active at the surface, belches out tons of magnetized material that sometimes sabotage our communication systems. Its ejections could damage some of our spacecraft. Like the parent who sometimes spanks (or used to) a naughty toddler, the Sun hurts us too, now and then.

Whether it is in fury or in glow, we may sing or say, modifying Jimmie Davis’ song:

She is our sunshine, our only sunshine,

That keeps us alive even when skies are grey.

She may never know how much we love her,

We hope she’ll never go away.