Making sense of the sun

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0:43And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zemarodi. Today on the show, an exploration of one of the most powerful forces in our lives, the sun. Starting on September 1st, 1859. That day, a British astronomer named Richard Carrington was looking at the sun and sketching sunspots, the dark patches on the solar surface. He was watching through his telescope and drawing them by hand. This is astrophysicist Noor Rawafi. And all of a sudden he saw something new. It was a bright light that lasted for nearly five minutes.

1:36And he just was mesmerized of this new thing that he'd never seen before. Carrington had no idea what it was until the next day when strange things started happening. Electric currents zipped through telegraph wires, setting telegraph stations on fire. Communications the world over were knocked out. Meanwhile, bright colored lights, aurorae, lit up the sky. People were seeing aurora in daytime, around the whole globe. The New York Times described them as streamers, rapidly changing hue from red to orange, orange to yellow, yellow to white, back to brilliant red. In the Rocky Mountains, the sky was so bright at midnight that confused gold miners woke up and started making breakfast.

2:33Carrington connected the dots and hypothesized that the bright light he'd seen was a solar flare, a storm on the sun so powerful that the radiation it released reached the Earth, disrupting the magnetic fields that surround our planet. But there was a lot of skepticism. It took really decades afterwards to realize, yeah, actually we are connected to the sun. Carrington was eventually proven right. This incident is now referred to as the Carrington event, and it is the strongest geomagnetic storm ever recorded. Meaning, if it were to happen today... In some places, people will be out of power for months, maybe for even years.

3:19And the economic losses will be in the trillions of dollars. Nowadays, we depend a lot on satellites, communication satellites or GPS satellites over there in space. So these geomagnetic storms can impact technology in space. And one prime example of this is the loss of SpaceX of nearly 40 satellites in 2023 or 2024. That actually was the result of a geomagnetic storm. It just knocks them out. Exactly. Absolutely. So solar storms can spell disaster. But the good news is that now, scientists like Nora Rawafi at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA are constantly monitoring sun storms.

4:03We know what the sun does at any moment. When there is an explosion, a flare, or a colon mass ejection, we see it. We know what direction they are going, how powerful they are, how fast they are. And we can even predict what would be the impact here on the Earth environment. But Noor and his team also have a spacecraft that is orbiting the sun and is due to fly closer to it than ever before, collecting data so that we can better understand why these storms happen and solve other solar mysteries. Without the sun, there would be no life on Earth. There would be no solar system. There would be no Earth.

4:41So in a way, we are the sons of the sun. It's our star. We owe our existence to the sun. But also our daily life depends on it. The sun is at the center of our solar system. It rises and sets on every day of our lives. We worship it, absolutely have to have it, but there is so much we don't know about this massive star that we depend on. So today on the show, making sense of the sun, what powers it, and how we can replicate and harness that power. So back to Tunisian astrophysicist Noor Rawafi and his team of international scientists. Their spacecraft, the Parker Solar Probe, has been orbiting the sun for the past six years, completing a full revolution around it every three months.

5:37and on Christmas Eve 2024, it is due to touch the sun. Since the dawn of the space age, NASA has wanted to fly a spacecraft as close as possible to the sun. Here's Nora Rawafi on the TED stage. But getting very close to a star is extremely risky and really hard. How would we protect a probe from just melting? How could it adjust for any problem on its own when you cannot communicate with it? Until recently, we simply didn't possess the technology. In 2018, that all changed with the launch of Parker Solar Probe. Parker Solar Probe is the first spacecraft to ever fly through the solar corona. It has revolutionized our understanding of the sun.

6:23So the probe is roughly the size of a small car. And making sure it wouldn't go up in flames as it approached the sun was an engineering feat. The only thing standing between the probe and incineration is an ingenious 11.5 cm thick, 2.3 m wide carbon foam shield. On Christmas Eve 2024, the shield's sun-facing side will endure about 1 ,000 degrees Celsius. The shield reflects light, absorbs heat, and is cooled by a network of water-filled pipes. All this system will be operating on December 24, 2024, when Parker Solar Probe achieves humanity's closest ever approach to a star. This will be a monumental and audacious achievement.

7:13In 69, we landed humans on the moon. In 24, we're going to embrace a star. It's being described as an attempt to touch the sun. Is that accurate? Well, we are flying within the solar corona, so the solar corona is part of the sun. Uh-huh, uh-huh. So we are flying through it. We are touching the atmosphere of the sun. And what information will be coming back to you? Parker Solar Probe has a whole suite of instruments around it. We have an imager, a white light imager, that will image the solar wind and all that solar activity that happens as it propagates from the sun all the way up. We have also instruments that measure magnetic fields, temperatures, densities, fluctuations, velocities, energetic particles that are flying almost at the speed of light.

8:08How does it send back all of this data to you? That is a challenge for us because the geometry doesn't allow us to talk to the spacecraft all the time. So we need the spacecraft to be in certain areas of space when the antenna can point to Earth. That way we can communicate, and basically we send information to the spacecraft. The spacecraft can send us data and information as well. The sun holds over 99.8 % of the solar system's total mass. Its shear size is mind-boggling, requiring more than 1.3 million Earths to fill its volume. All of that mass is in the form of plasma, a glowing soup of electrically charged particles.

8:55At the solar core, gravity is exceedingly high, producing temperatures in excess of 15 million degrees Celsius. The solar surface is plenty hot, 6 ,000 degrees, hot enough to melt anything we know. But in the corona, we're talking millions of degrees Celsius. How can it be over 300 times hotter despite being the sun's outermost layer? Physicists have suggested since the 50s that all of that heat must generate a constant outflow of particles. This is the solar wind. It speeds away at up to 3 million kilometers per hour. At that speed, you can get from the Earth to the Moon in under 20 minutes. Behind all this is the sun's magnetism.

9:41As solar magnetic fields twist, bend, and tangle, they store enormous amounts of energy. And when they snap, huge explosions like flares and coronal mass ejections release this energy and turn it into heat and accelerating the plasma. It takes only a handful of these strong events to fulfill our current energy needs for some 200 ,000 years. That is the whole span of modern human existence. The sun does that in minutes to a few hours. These same explosions propel particles to nearly the speed of light and turn them into formidable hazards to spacecrafts and to humans in space. Our power grid can fall victim, like in March 1989 in the northeast of the U.S., Canada, when a succession of solar storms caused an intense geomagnetic storm.

10:32So we need to learn how the sun does all this and more.

10:39What is the prediction in terms of solar flares and storms in the next decade or so? Well, we are at the solar maximum now, and that's actually one of the big mysteries when it's predicting how strong the solar cycle will be. That's one of the big things that now we are trying to understand, but it's not really easy at all. So we need some new missions to help us understand what is going on in the interior of the sun itself and observe the sun for a long time from different viewpoints to come to terms how the magnetic fields form in the solar interior and how they rise to the surface and what is the source of their cyclic nature.

11:27And if you think of it, Parker Solar Probe is flying through original space that we never visited before. And whatever measurement we make there might actually carry with it a potential discovery for us. You have a look of absolute delight on your face as you're describing this. Did you think you would learn these things in your lifetime? Sometimes it's still kind of, it's like a dream, but you are living it. and the fascinating thing about Park Solar Probe is also that the pace of the mission is so fast, so rough. Every three months, we have a flyby around the sun and we have a new load of data.

12:16We are like spoiled kids in a way. Whenever we get a new load of data, we jump on it. We are so curious, what is new in it? The data we are getting from it is so loaded with knowledge, with new things that we need to investigate. That is going to take us decades from now to look into it. And in a way, Parkasolo Probe will serve generations to come, many generations to come. And for me, Parkasolo Probe is a mission for the ages. That was astrophysicist Noor Rawafi. He is a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist for NASA's Parker Solar Probe. You can learn more about the Parker Solar Probe mission at science.nasa.gov slash sun.

13:08And you can see Noor's full talk at TED.com. On the show today, the sun. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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15:00Ready to bring your visions to life? Learn how at AmazonBusiness.com. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on today's show, The Sun.

15:17In Central California, there is a government research facility, a massive campus with a particular building, a building like no other. It's 10 stories tall, the size of three football fields stacked side by side. And in there is the largest, most energetic laser in the world. a laser that crisscrosses from one side of the building to the other, being amplified and then split, amplified and split again and again and again, until there are 192 lasers, all firing at once. To create, for just a fraction of a second, a burst of energy, A blip of burning plasma. A star. So fusion is the reaction that powers the sun.

16:20This is Tammy Ma. She is the scientist leading the fusion project at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Fusion is one of the most fundamental reactions of the universe that makes life possible here on Earth and is responsible for almost everything in the world around us. In space, stars make fusion look easy. Their gigantic mass creates such immense gravitational forces that hydrogen is squeezed together, fused together into the heavier element of helium. And through that process generating a ton of energy, a ton of heat. And so you can think of the sun and the stars as these giant balls of plasma that are constantly fusing.

17:14There is no way to create that kind of gravity here on Earth. But Tammy and her colleagues do have a way of bringing those elements together. That super powerful laser. And if we can recreate fusion here on Earth in a controlled way, if we can make it work, it is the holy grail of energy. Fusion means unlocking a different kind of nuclear power. On the TED stage, Tammy Ma recently explained the big benefits of fusion power. For one thing, it creates a tremendous amount of energy. How tremendous. Well, one single pound of fusion fuel has the same amount of energy as 5 ,000 barrels of oil or three and a half million pounds of coal.

18:10And speaking of fuel, the fuel that we need for fusion is also very abundant. Fusion needs hydrogen isotopes called deuterium, which is found naturally in seawater, and another one called tritium. We actually have enough fusion fuel on Earth to last us 30 billion years of human consumption at today's levels. Fusion also promises to be clean because when hydrogen and helium are fused together, they don't release carbon. Carbon is nowhere in that equation. And fusion is considered pretty safe. In order to start a fusion reaction, we first have to put energy into the system to make the atoms fuse.

18:52To stop a fusion reaction, the power going in just needs to be turned off. And while fusion creates some waste... It's not the kind of waste that will last for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Instead, the low-level nuclear waste of fusion can decay away in just decades. Now, to be fair, there are some downsides to fusion too. Fusion is incredibly complex and incredibly difficult. The development of fusion has been and will be expensive. But the potential benefits of fusion are so great that it is worth it. I mean, there is a joke. I'm sure everybody always says this to you, Tammy, but the joke is like, fusion is just around the corner.

19:42It is the new source of energy in the next five years, the next decade. It's kind of like the sign at the bar that says, free beer tomorrow. Yeah, that's a good analogy. So we call fusion one of the grand scientific and technological challenges of humankind. We've been trying to recreate fusion on Earth since we understood what fusion was. So British scientists actually figured out the fusion reaction and patented it in the early 1940s. But you have to build tools that are strong enough that can help you to contain that plasma. And you have to keep it going long enough that you can generate a lot more energy out than you put in in order for fusion to be commercially viable.

20:32Fusion experiments, big and small, are happening all around the world. One major milestone many are working towards, fusion ignition. So the definition of ignition is more energy out of the fusion reaction than the laser energy that it took to actually get the reaction going. That is the goal of Tammy's lab, which cost$3.5 billion and took 12 years to build. Let's go back to that ginormous laser. It's called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. We're going to split that beam into 192 weights and then directed towards the fusion chamber. Half the laser beams go up and half come down. and they're going to concentrate their light on a tiny cylinder that sits right in the middle, about the size of a pencil eraser.

21:29The lasers go into that cylinder and create a bath of x-rays that then envelop the little fuel pellet that sits right in the middle. We're going to reach temperatures of over 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the center of the sun, and pressures that would feel like 100 billion Earth atmospheres pressing down on you. And then we start a little spark right in the center, creating a miniature star and with it a huge burst of energy. And if we do it right, we can actually get a whole lot more energy out than the energy that went in to start all of this. So NIF is the most energetic, the largest laser system in the world.

22:17Explain what that actually means, like how much energy it uses. So every time we fire those lasers, it is a thousand times the power of the entire U.S. electrical grid. Whoa. I know that sounds crazy. Yes, it does. You know, every time we fire the lasers, it's not like your lights flicker at home, right? You don't know we took a shot. So what we're doing is we're taking a huge amount of energy, but we're compressing it down into just nanoseconds, fractions of the blink of a human eye. And so that's why we're able to actually draw our energy off of the Alameda County electrical grid. It's about$21 in electricity per shot.

22:58So not crazy crazy. No. And then that energy all gets concentrated on that fusion fuel to try to recreate a miniature star in the laboratory. I mean, it sounds like the most incredibly powerful high-tech oven on our planet. But like an oven, can you turn on a light and see what's happening inside? How do you know it's working? That is a great question. What we're able to do is with our diagnostic instruments, try to pull out all the information that we can. We're able to capture particles that can tell us by how fast they were moving, what temperature the plasma was. We have some of the fastest X-ray cameras in the world capable of 50 billion frames per second so that we can— 50 billion?

23:4750 billion frames per second, yeah. Wow. So we can piece those together and create a movie of how that plasma is actually forming. And from that, infer how good the experiment was. Our team at Lawrence Livermore National Lab are the stewards of work that started in 1960 because of national security. We need to understand fusion to understand how to ensure that our U.S. nuclear arsenal stays safe and effective. And that is what has provided the steady funding to pursue this very difficult physics challenge over decades. And in that time, we've improved our physics understanding and computational simulation models.

24:33We've designed new diagnostic instruments capable of taking better, clearer, faster pictures of the experiment. We've continuously pushed up the laser energy and found ways to build better targets. And guess what? But in December of 2022, we finally did it.

25:00Our team at Lawrence Livermore National Lab demonstrated fusion ignition. For the very first time in human history, we generated a controlled thermonuclear fusion reaction in the laboratory that generated more energy out than went in with the lasers to start in. And now, now we've actually been able to repeat ignition four more times in just the last 15 months, with our most successful experiment giving us over twice as much energy out as we put in with the lasers. Getting ignition was the core goal of the NIF, your laser. It was a key milestone for fusion science. But what was that moment like for you personally?

25:50Funny enough, Manoush, I have actually slept through a lot of those experiments. We run the machine 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But I did get the call the next morning when I was at the airport. And my boss actually calls me and whispers into the phone and says, Tammy, I think we got ignition. and I paused for a second because this is something that we've been working on for, like I said, decades. And I just burst into tears. I was so excited. Yeah. And I started jumping up and down at the gate. And so I was just absolutely thrilled and tears were rolling down my face because it's something that you and a team of people have dedicated your life to.

26:39And to be able to be there for that breakthrough was just enormous. So, are we done? Well, not quite. In order to move towards that fusion energy future, we'll have to figure out how to harness this energy in a working fusion power plant. And to be clear, there's still a long scientific and engineering road ahead. Just to build on our successes at NIF, we'll have to build more efficient lasers, mass-manufacture targets, and figure out robotics for automated operations and more. The depth and breadth of this challenge will require sustained investment from government and private industry and all of us working together.

27:26We're all racing to make this a reality, but there's still a lot more work to be done. What do you say to critics who, you know, maybe they say the same thing about landing on the moon why are we pouring billions and billions of dollars into projects that may or may not work when we could be using that money right now to solve problems with technologies, take solar for example, that we do know that they work? How do you respond to people who feel that way about fusion? I respond that it is the human story and it is what makes us human to continue exploring and continue pushing the boundaries. Because there's all kinds of benefits as you do that that you don't even know about.

28:21For example, extreme ultraviolet lithography, EUV lithography, which is the technology that allows us to print smaller and smaller computer chips with greater and greater capability. that technology was actually a spin out from laser fusion research. And it was nothing that we intended to do, but there's all kinds of benefits to doing forefront science and technology development. And fusion is one of them. And for me, even being able to help a little bit, being able to push the boundaries and do science and generate conditions like we have at the center of the sun, right, here on Earth. Experiments that have never been done before is just so exciting and so motivating.

29:14And if I can contribute a little bit to pushing the field forward, I'm happy. That was Tammy Ma. She leads the Inertial Fusion Energy Initiative at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. You can watch her full talk at ted.npr.org.

29:35On the show today, the sun, including how humans can collect all the energy that naturally emanates from it. As humanity, we've always harnessed the power of the sun. You know, people putting out their clothes to dye, people drying fruit and vegetables, people orientating their houses towards the sun. This is the story of our survival. This is Rebecca Collier. She is the executive director of Renew 2030, a global coalition working to rapidly scale renewable energy, especially solar energy. In the turn of the last century, in the 1900s, people started to really think about how to do that from a technology and an electronics perspective.