The sun's surface temperature is 5,800 Kelvin or about 10,000 °F. But... the temperature of its core is 15,700,000 Kelvin! The sun's diameter is 865,000 miles,
The Radiative Zone, from 25% to 70% of the solar radius, the Radiative material is hot and dense enough that thermal radiation (not fusion) transfers the intense heat of the Core outward. Heat is transferred by photon radiation. Very hot ions of hydrogen and helium emit photons which are absorbed in only a few millimeters of solar plasma and then are re-emitted again in random directions. This random radiation process takes a very long time for photons to reach the sun's surface as sunlight. Estimates of the "photon travel time" range from 10,000 to 170,000 years! Nuclear fusion takes place in the sun's core. Energy then moves by photon radiation through the radiation zone (no fusion) to the convection zone. The energy in the form of heat then moves by convection to the surface. Convection is the flow of heat through a fluid, in this case plasma. (Convection does not occur in solids.) Convection takes place in one of two ways: by the random interaction of high energy (heated) particles (Brownian Motion) and by the flow of heated currents in the fluid plasma. Once the energy reaches the sun's surface it is mainly transmitted by rays (photons) and the solar wind (particles) to the rest of the hemisphere. The energy output of the sun is too variable and periodic to be produced by photon radiation from the sun’s surface with such long transfer delay times. Energy must be transferred from the sun’s core to its surface rapidly through magnetic energy transfer. Magnetic fields interact with the sun’s atmosphere to convert the huge energy content of the magnetic fields to photon energy magnetically induced in this corona. Variations in total solar irradiance were too small to detect with technology available before the satellite era, although the small fraction in ultra-violet light has recently been found to vary significantly more than previously thought over the course of a solar cycle. Total solar output is now measured to vary (over the last three 11-year sunspot cycles) by approximately 0.1%, during the 11-year sunspot cycle. Magnetic effects add to the energy output of the sun witnessed by the change in the sun’s radiance based on sunspot activity. Could magnetic fields originating on the surface of the sun be producing nuclear reactions via cold fusion? This all goes back to 2006, when physicists at Purdue, Stanford and other places noticed something that at first defied physical explanation: Radioactive elements were changing their decay rates. This flew in the face of long-accepted physics theory, which held that these rates are constant. Radioactive decay apparently grew more pronounced in winter than in summer, and when scientists went looking for an explanation, they noticed this appeared to correlate with solar flares. Last year, we learned from Purdue physicist Ephraim Fischbach that this kept happening. He noticed a change in the radioactive decay rate of a manganese isotope, and also tied it to a solar flare that happened a night before. So that meant something came out of the sun, went through the Earth, hit a piece of manganese-54 and changed the rate at which it decays into chromium-54, spewing out ionizing particles. This also happened to an isotope called chlorine-36, in different experiments at different labs. The unusual decay change has happened during 10 solar flares since 2006, and the song remains the same. "We have repeatedly seen a precursor signal preceding a solar flare," Fischbach says in a new news release. "We think this has predictive value." The decay-rate aberrations that Jenkins noticed occurred during the middle of the night in Indiana – meaning that something produced by the sun had traveled all the way through the Earth to reach Jenkins' detectors. What could the flare send forth that could have such an effect? Jenkins and Fischbach guessed that the culprits in this bit of decay-rate mischief were probably solar neutrinos, the almost weightless particles famous for flying at almost the speed of light through the physical world – humans, rocks, oceans or planets – with virtually no interaction with anything. Sunspots must be producing neutrinos as a result of magnetically induced nuclear reactions, since radioactive decay is affected by sunspots. Neutrino production is the smoking gun for magnetically induced LENR. It does not make since to assume that all neutrinos and their production via nuclear activity must come from the core of the sun. The takeaway for logic to prevail, LENR is produced by magnetic activity on the surface of the sun.
