How did the sun form?
Question from Maddie Ferguson
Scientists think the Sun began as a giant gas and dust cloud rotating in space. Over millions of years, as this spun faster, the cloud collapsed into a disc. Some of the material around the disc formed the planets as small clumps of material stuck together, but most of the gas and dust was pulled into a large mass in the middle, a body that became the Sun. At its centre the temperature and pressure became so enormous that a thermonuclear reaction started, smashing atoms together to release energy and starting the fusion chain reaction that makes the Sun ‘burn’.
Answered by Tom Lean for Brain Dump in How It Works issue 116
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