Scroll to fall in · 20 million km
From the solar wind to the core. Every layer on the way is drawn the way the instrument that can see it draws it, in that instrument's colours. Below the surface nothing can see at all, and from there the page has to listen instead.
Begin, 30 solar radii out
Hot, then cold, then hotter than anything on the way in. The horizontal scale is stretched around the surface so the thin layers show; the vertical scale multiplies by ten at each line.
None of these colours is what your eye would see. Each is a label for one camera and one wavelength, and each wavelength comes from gas at one temperature. Brighter means more light at that wavelength, nothing else.
Spread sunlight into a rainbow and it has gaps. Each dark line is one kind of atom in the Sun's outer layers soaking up its own exact colour. Joseph von Fraunhofer mapped them in 1814 and lettered the strongest. They are how anyone knows what the Sun is made of: by mass about 73% hydrogen, 25% helium and under 2% everything else. Two of his lines turned out not to be the Sun at all.
INSIDE THE SUN · v1 · a model, not a photograph. Type: IBM Plex (OFL).