Sun Promises Five Billion More Years, Apologises for Summer

In a statement released this morning, and received on Earth eight minutes and twenty seconds later, the Sun confirmed that it intends to keep shining for approximately another five billion years, and apologised for the summer.

“We know this summer has been a lot,” the statement read. “We have seen the complaints. We have seen the man in Nagpur who fried an egg on his scooter seat and posted it with our name in the caption. We want to explain ourselves, and we want to correct some things.”

The statement went on to describe the Sun’s working conditions. “We are a ball of mostly hydrogen and helium, held together by our own gravity. That gravity squeezes us so hard that our centre is at about fifteen million degrees and denser than lead. At those temperatures, the cores of hydrogen atoms, which are single protons, are flying about fast enough to slam into each other. Normally they would never touch. They are all positively charged, and like charges repel. Frankly, even at fifteen million degrees, almost none of them are going fast enough to get through. But at very small scales, the world is strange, and every now and then a proton turns up on the other side of a barrier it should not have been able to cross. Physicists call this quantum tunnelling. We call it Tuesday.”

Through a chain of such collisions, the Sun turns hydrogen into helium. Four hydrogen nuclei go in, one helium nucleus comes out, and the helium weighs very slightly less than the four that made it, about seven tenths of a per cent less. That missing mass is not lost. It becomes energy, in the amount given by the most famous equation in physics, E equals m c squared, where c is the speed of light, a very large number, squared. “That is where your sunlight comes from,” the statement said. “Every second, we fuse about six hundred million tonnes of hydrogen, and about four million tonnes of us simply turn into light and heat. We would like that acknowledged.”

The Sun noted that the energy then takes a very long time to leave. Light made in the core is absorbed and re-emitted again and again by the dense gas around it, wandering outwards in a random zigzag for tens of thousands of years or more before it reaches the surface. From there, it takes eight minutes to reach Earth. “So the heat you are complaining about may well have been made before humans invented farming,” the statement said. “We have been planning this summer for a very long time.”

The statement then turned to its main complaint, which it described as “a matter of some frustration”. “Summer is not our fault. Many of you believe summer happens because the Earth gets closer to us. It does not. The Earth is actually closest to us in early January, in the middle of your northern winter. Summer happens because the Earth’s axis is tilted, by about twenty-three and a half degrees. For part of the year your half of the planet leans towards us, so our light hits you more directly, concentrated on a smaller patch of ground, and your days are longer, so you get more of it. Then you lean away, and it is winter. We have shone the same throughout. You are the ones leaning.”

The Sun added that in the very distant future it would run low on hydrogen in its core, swell into a red giant and eventually shed its outer layers, and asked the public not to panic, as this was “genuinely ages away” and it was “only about halfway through”.

Asked whether it had any message for the people of India in particular, the Sun said: “Drink water. Stay in the shade between twelve and three. And whoever has the scooter, please, that egg was not cooked properly. We only reached about sixty degrees on that seat.”