What’s something you often yearn for but then sometimes wish would leave you alone? That could be the sun. But our friendly closest star is much more than that bright circle in the sky we mainly think about when it’s not visible and we’re cold. It’s one of the few things that are absolutely vital to life on Earth. So let’s focus on the sun, without looking directly at it, of course.
Listen on Podbean:
Listen on YouTube:
A few resources:
Sun (Wikipedia)
Sun vs. atomic bomb (YouTube)
6 ancient sites aligned with the solstice and the equinox
The Light Eaters book by Zoë Schlanger
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Cover image of butterfly from Pixabay (artist: Myriams-Fotos, https://pixabay.com/photos/sun-sunset-setting-sun-3275314)
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Hello, I am so glad to be back talking to you again today, and I know it’s been a while. I was away visiting my mom, who is a big fan of mine, so thanks for spreading the word, Mom, about this show, and I hope you enjoy this episode.
Then I had a terrible cough. There was no way I could talk for even nine minutes without coughing, so hopefully that won’t happen today.
And I’ll be honest with you, sometimes I delay or procrastinate recording an episode that I really want to record because things going on in the world get me down, and I just kind of feel like, “ah, what’s the point?”
But I know there’s a point, and my aim is to help you take a few minutes to feel some awe and wonder in the world. I’m going to start talking about that even more than I already do, because I really believe that if everybody could notice and contemplate the amazing things in this world, that the world would be a better place.
I know that not everyone is listening to me or listens to this podcast, but you are listening, so thanks for that, and I hope that this can inspire your day a little bit.
Yesterday was one of those glorious sunny fall days. It wasn’t hot, and it wasn’t cold. It was so perfect, and it made me happy after several days of rain, even though I also like the rain. My cat Monty loved it too. He went outside on the balcony and lay down in the sun.
It was perfect, and for me, it feels good now to talk about the sun with you today because it’s the fall here in the northern hemisphere, and in July, I didn’t want to think about the sun, but I had to think about it because it was just completely dominant in my life. It was too hot, too bright, etc. And one day, in kind of some despair, I said to my husband, “You know, the sun is not our friend. It’s really not!” And he just looked at me and said, “Well, like not so fast!” And of course, he’s right. The sun is not only our friend, but we would die pretty quickly if it went away.
So today, let’s talk about this marvelous, amazing star called the sun.
One of the interesting ironies about talking about the sun today is it’s something that we take for granted, or we even curse in the middle of July, but we’re so dependent on it that it’s everything to us, yet we’re not allowed to look at it. We have to avert our gaze, yet it is one of the most awe-inspiring entities in our lives.
Now, obviously, we need the sun for our lives because we rely on plants, and just a quick review of how plants use the sun, right? It’s called photosynthesis. They absorb the sunlight and carbon dioxide, and they absorb water from their roots and from the air sometimes to create carbohydrates like glucose to feed themselves.
I’m reading this wonderful, beautifully written book called The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger. She writes, “Photosynthesis, so basic to plants, is the prerequisite for most every other life form on earth,” and she also writes, “Plants have made every iota of sugar we have ever consumed.” So photosynthesis is awe-inspiring in and of itself.
There are many, many things I could say about the sun, but of course I just have a few minutes, so I’ll talk about a few that I find particularly awe-inspiring.
The sun is a medium-sized star by star standards, but by our standards, of course, it’s absolutely enormous. 1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun. Of course, they’d melt, but that’s a different story.
The temperature at the sun’s core is about 15 million degrees Celsius or 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.
Energy takes about 170,000 years to reach the sun’s surface from its core. I just found that incredible, like that’s how big it is, and once the energy reaches the sun’s surface, it is cooled to about 5,500 degrees Celsius, 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
How does that energy even happen? Inside the sun’s core, hydrogen atoms fuse into helium atoms, so the sun is like an enormous nuclear fusion bomb, and that may sound horrible but it is awe-inspiring.
A book that I just finished reading called Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben, which I’ll talk a little bit more about later, says that the sun’s energy is like 90 billion hydrogen bombs per second, but you didn’t come here to hear about bombs, did you?
Now, some scientists spend their whole careers studying the sun. One of the most interesting places I’ve ever been is the solar telescope in the town of Sunspot, New Mexico. If you ever go there, it’s in central New Mexico up in the Lincoln National Forest. You can take a tour, or at least back when I went you could take a tour, and I actually got to see a solar telescope that was working and pointed at the sun. It was really, really cool.
We think of the sun also, of course, as being very, very old, but it’s only about halfway through the main stable part of its lifespan, which is predicted to be about 10 billion years, and it really hasn’t changed much in the past 4 billion years or so.
So what’s the sun going to be like in 5 billion years from now? According to the experts, it’s going to become a red giant for about a billion years. It’ll be so big that the planets Mercury and Venus will be completely consumed by the sun, and eventually so will the Earth, sorry to say. Then the sun will become a white dwarf for trillions of years.
Trillions! What does that even mean?
Until it very possibly becomes a black dwarf and then loses all of its energy.
And if you just read the Wikipedia section about the sun’s lifespan, it’s like creepy awe-inspiring to consider the depths of time that they’re talking about, right? It’ll be like, this is going to happen for 100 million years, and then another phase will be 20 million years long, and you barely even know how to contemplate that. It almost gives me a stomachache. And also thinking about how astronomers can figure this all out and make these complicated models. So I don’t want to have a stomachache or give any of you a stomachache, so I’ll change the topic a little bit now.
Back to planet Earth.
As you may know, many cultures throughout history have honored the importance of the sun in their religions and their traditions. There have been multiple sun gods in various traditions, like Apollo in the ancient Greek tradition, Surya in the Hindu tradition, Amaterasu in Japanese tradition, and also sun gods in ancient Egypt, Native American cultures, and many others.
There are still today festivals honoring the sun and its deities around the world, including several in India that I read about. And if you’re from India, or if you’ve traveled to India to see one of those festivals, I’d love to hear from you in the comments of my YouTube channel. Tell me about what it was like.
The sun lines up with various human-made constructions in many places around the world. For example, during the summer solstice at Stonehenge, during the winter solstice at Newgrange in Ireland, and also at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, and during the spring and fall equinox at Machu Picchu, and the Great Sphinx and Pyramid of Khafre in Egypt, and numerous other sites.
We can even hear about the sun in monotheistic religions, such as Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun. And here he’s praying to God, but he says, “Praised be you, my Lord, with all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, who is the day through whom you give us light.” Whether or not you believe in God, I think that’s a lovely quote there from Saint Francis.
So regardless of anyone’s spiritual or religious beliefs, we know that we can harness the sun for our own good. And did you know, and maybe you’ve been reading a little bit in the news, about how solar power has become cheaper and is spreading quickly around the world? It’s even spreading in the United States these days, although China has become a leader in this industry.
I mentioned a few minutes ago the Bill McKibben book called Here Comes the Sun. It’s a recent book, as of the fall of 2025. He talks a lot about solar energy, and I’m not going to say that he says it’s going to save the world, but it’s his one great hope at this time. He devotes his very last chapter to the sun’s role in religious and spiritual traditions, as I’ve talked about, and more generally to the awe and wonder of the sun, including how solar eclipses unite people.
And last year I did an episode about solar eclipses, which you can find and listen to if you want, because they really do unite people from all walks of life. He talks about how a group of American prisoners successfully sued to be allowed to get solar eclipse glasses and watch the eclipse together, and they said it is so rare that people of various religious faiths can come together for a moment of awe and wonder.
One quote from this last chapter of Here Comes the Sun is, “We look up ever more rarely from the phones in our palms to see the world around us.”
This quote really kind of captures what I’m doing here and why I’m doing this podcast.
So again, I hope you can notice the sun without looking directly at it, and just appreciate how absolutely vital it is for all of us. Maybe you can give the sun a bit of your attention today, honor it however it feels right for you, and I look forward to talking with you next time.
Have a good day, whether it’s sunny, cloudy, or whatever the weather is.