At the sun's core, the high pressure and temperature cause atoms that would repel each other to overcome what is called "electrostatic repulsion," to merge their nuclei. The energy produced in the core through thermonuclear fusion takes 170,000 years to move from the core to the convective zone. These thermonuclear fusion reactions make the sun a giant power house, able to provide light and warmth to the Earth, which is 92.96 million miles away.
The radiative zone is a dense intermediate layer between the core and the convective zone. It is called radiative because the energy travels to the outer layer in the form of radiation. The temperatures range from 14 million to about 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit, in the outer areas. In the convective zone, temperature is lower than 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit and large bubbles of plasma move towards the surface. Although the convective zone makes up more than 60 percent of the volume of the sun, it represents only 2 percent of the sun's mass.
With temperatures of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the photosphere is the outer layer from where the sun's radiation escapes. After it leaves the sun, it takes eight minutes for the radiation to arrive to the Earth, in the form of sunlight. The chromosphere and the corona are located above the photosphere. In these outer layers, temperature increases with altitude, and can reach 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit. During an eclipse, the chromosphere is detected as a red rim around the sun. The corona appears as an outer white crown.
Coronal mass ejections are constantly occurring in the corona. Coronal mass ejections are bursts of solar wind or radiation, that rises above the corona, and have roughly the energy of one billion hydrogen bombs. Solar winds travel across the solar system, and they have eroded the atmospheres of close planets, such as Mercury. The northern lights observed near the Arctic are the result of the interaction between solar winds and the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field.