AST 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Convection Zone, Solar Core, Neutrino
Document Summary
There are three basic modes of transporting energy (in any environment, not just in the sun): Conduction: heat transport by direct contact (if you put your hand on a stove burner, conduction is the process that burns you). The density of the solar interior is too low for this to be an important means of energy transport. Photons travel some short distance in the ionized solar interior, before they are absorbed or scattered off of ions. This is the dominant mode of energy transport in the deep solar interior. Hot material that is covered by cooler material can become convectively unstable. In this case, the hot material physically moves upward, until it reaches a level where it cools efficiently, and then sinks down again. Observations of solar granulation demonstrate that this is the dominant mode of energy transport in the upper layer of the solar interior.
