Awesome Sun

There’s a whole sub-genre of YouTube videos featuring various objects being jammed into industrial shredders. Atomic Marvel went to the extreme and stuck the entire sun into a shredder to see what would happen. We’re surprised it didn’t melt the machine as soon as it hit the gears with its 10,000-degree surface temperature.

The 2024 solar eclipse is a big deal here on Earth – especially if you’re in the path of totality. But are there better places to observe an eclipse? Well, if you leave our planet, things might get better… or worse. MinutePhysics takes us on a journey through our solar system to see what a solar eclipse might look like on other planets, non-planets, and asteroids.

This incredible footage from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is about as we’re going to get to the Sun. The 59-minute time-lapse was stitched together from 133 days of extreme-ultraviolet imagery the probe captured of the Sun’s corona between August 12 and December 22, 2022.

Remember when you were a kid and burnt leaves with the sun and a magnifying glass? This is just like that, only bigger. For his graduation presentation, Jelle Seegers built a metal rig with a handmade fresnel lens on top that can concentrate solar rays tightly enough to smelt metal. It can achieve temperatures up to 1000ºC.

Replicating the sun’s brightness indoors isn’t easy to achieve. But if anyone can pull it off, it’s the guys from Corridor Crew. Though this time out, they didn’t rely on computers and visual effects and instead loaded up the studio with an insane amount of lighting gear. We’re amazed they didn’t light their test subject on fire.

Filmmaker Seán Doran processed about a week’s worth of data captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to create this awe-inspiring UHD video of the Sun’s activity. Max out the resolution, go full screen, dim the lights, and crank up the audio for a truly hypnotic journey to our Solar System’s number one life-giver.

Given that the Sun kicks out 35 octillion lumens of light, you’d think it might be hard to fake its brightness indoors. This video from DIY Perks shows us how it’s possible to create an incredibly convincing approximation of its parallel light rays using a high-powered LED, a parabolic dish, and a liquid diffuser.

The speed of light is pretty darned fast, but given just how far the Earth is away from the Sun, its light doesn’t get here instantly. It’s Okay to Be Smart teaches us how it’s not just a simple math equation, but complex astrophysics explain how sunlight is much older than you’d think.

Since 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has captured more than 425 million images of the Sun, with a still recorded once every 0.75 seconds. By grabbing one of these pictures from each hour, this time-lapse video condenses 10 years of footage down to just 61 minutes. Put on your sunglasses, sit back, and relax.

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections are frequent occurrences on the Sun. Some have been known to disrupt radio waves, but could they actually cause damage? Kurzgesagt stares directly into the Sun to educate us on solar storms, why they occur, and if a strong enough super storm could actually wipe out civilization.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has been capturing high-def images of our sun for more than 7 years. Here’s footage captured by two of their systems – the larger one showing visible light, the smaller one showing extreme UV light, and the line graph displays sunspot activity.

Kurzgesagt’s latest thought experiment explores what might happen to us if we somehow managed to load up bits of the Sun brought them right here to Earth. Depending on which part you captured, it could simply vanish, or destroy life as we know it.

Lots of us stayed outside to watch the big solar eclipse this week, but this isn’t the view any of us saw. Instead of looking up at the skies, the University of Wisconsin Madison time-lapsed weather satellite imagery to track the shadow of the moon as it crossed the US.

A demonstration of just how intense the heat of the Sun can be when concentrated through a fresnel lens. It takes less than a minute to turn what was once a solid metal penny into a molten pile of goo. Also, we’ve just subscribed to Let’s Melt This.

Here’s one of those amazing phenomena that you can’t believe actually occurs on our planet. melkiy582 captured this awe-inspiring footage of these solar parhelia and an accompanying halo while riding the train in Moscow.

By turning the screen of an old rear-projection TV into a giant fresnel magnifying lens, Grant Thompson magnifies the light of the sun to cook food, boil liquid, ignite fuel, and melt pennies.

Solar chargers are handy, but most of them take forever to power up your gear. The SunVolt’s fold-flat panel is capable of charging multiple gadgets as fast as if they were plugged into the wall.

Using an incredibly well-focused mirror, this thing can harness the power of the sun into a 3500°C, rock-melting weapon. If you thought frying ants with a magnifying glass was something…