REAL STARS, THE ONES IN SPACE, ARE SIMPLE BEASTS. Our sun formed some 4.6 billion years ago from a cloud consisting of essentially one ingredient: hydrogen, the most basic and abundant element in the universe. Gravity kneaded the cloud into a big, rotating ball and kept squeezing from there, density and warmth spiking, until its core reached about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.
Hydrogen crumbles when collisions occur at this temperature and pressure, creating the soupy jumble of atomic parts known as plasma, the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas. Though rare on Earth outside of lightning bolts and neon signs, plasma accounts for over 99 percent of the solar system’s mass, most of it stored, highly agitated, in the sun. Throughout the sun’s soup, trillions of times…
