I like to glance at the sun sometimes. I know I'm not supposed to, but every once in a while I just wonder what's so bad, and I just take a glance. My curiosity is usually rewarded with a few minutes of seeing strange glowing orbs in my vision where the sun used to be. Okay, so the sun is bad to look at, and most of us know why (imagine having those glowing orb-like things there permanently), but what makes the sun work? For decades, centuries, millennia, you name it, scientists have been searching for the key as to what happens inside the big glowing orange-yellow thing in outer space. Well fairly recently, we found out.
In 1920 a man named Sir Arthur Eddington proposed that the sun burned nitrogen (most of the air around you is nitrogen) and burned it so much that the nitrogens melted together to form helium. This all happened because not too long before this a great guy called Einstein said that E=mc^2. So basically, some energy was produced. That energy that we see is given off as light, and there's so much energy in that light that if you glance for even a single second, you will feel the side effects.
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