Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: A nuclear storm of galactic proportions

that can both give

and take away life as we know it.

The Sun.

It's one of countless stars in the universe.

But to planet Earth and our solar system,

it's the source of, well, everything.

Humanity has worshiped this glowing disk in the sky

since the beginning of time.

Yet even with our modern technology,

we still know so little about it.

Could unlocking the mysteries of the Sun be the difference

between life and death for human civilization?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

SHATNER: 93 million miles from Earth,

an immense star commands the center of our solar system.

It is known as "the Sun,"

and its intense gravitational pull controls the orbit

of eight planets,

300 moons,

comets,

asteroids

and even dwarf planets

that hover on the edge of its reach.

ALEX YOUNG: The Sun itself

is incredibly huge.

And it's hard to get a real sense of that.

It's so small in the sky when we see it here on Earth.

If you thought of the Sun as a big ball,

in order to fill up that big ball,

you would have to put in more than 1,300,000 Earths.

JASON WRIGHT: The Sun holds the solar system together.

Astronomers have actually done the calculation

to see what would happen

if the Sun were to suddenly just disappear.

And if that Sun just goes away,

all the planets would fly off into the galaxy.

SHATNER: Here on Earth, this massive ball of energy

affects nearly every aspect of life on our planet.

WRIGHT: The Sun's energy is the source

of all life on Earth.

The reason that Earth is at the temperature it is,

the way all life on Earth gets the energy it needs to survive--

that all comes from sunlight.

EDWARD SCHWIETERMAN: The Sun drives photosynthesis.

Without the Sun, we would not have green areas of the Earth

with plants and algae

and other organisms,

and we wouldn't be here today.

The Sun also provides the heat

that allows our oceans to remain liquid and not freeze.

In addition,

the long-term climate cycles on Earth are impacted

by interactions with our atmosphere and the Sun.

NICHOLEEN VIALL: The Sun is

an environment that is unlike

any environment we can make here on Earth.

It's millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

And yet, if we didn't have the normal radiation

that we get from the Sun,

then the Earth would freeze,

and all of our life would die.

SHATNER: For thousands of years,

human civilization has understood

the Sun's critical connection to life on Earth.

And to many ancient cultures,

the Sun was believed to be a god.

STUART CLARK: The importance of the Sun

as we recognize it for driving all life on Earth

meant that different cultures, different societies

throughout the ages have deified the Sun.

The Aztecs, for example, practiced human sacrifice

to appease that god

to keep this day-and-night cycle going.

All over the planet, we find megalithic structures,

huge temples to the Sun,

built in perfect alignment, so we can see

that they were reading the movement of the Sun

to mark the seasons.

This makes us aware

that they were in intense, intimate conversation

in relationship with the heavens,

with the movement of the Sun,

that they would build this in such an exact way

to honor that moment in the cycle.

SHATNER: By 450 BC, great thinkers,

like Greek philosopher Anaxagoras,

began to look at the Sun from a scientific angle,

and wondered if the giant ball of heat

that brought light to each day might also be related

to the so-called "fiery stones" that twinkled in the night sky.

2,000 years later, during the Renaissance,

scientists risked their lives trying to unravel the mysteries

of this glowing, celestial orb.

Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus

publishes his magnum opus entitled

On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.

In his groundbreaking text,

Copernicus proposes a controversial idea.

He declares

that the Sun is the stationary center of the universe.

European medieval astronomers believed

that the Earth was at the center of the universe

and every celestial object orbited around the Earth.

But Copernicus proposed

that the Sun was at the center of the solar system.

This was all based on naked-eye observations

of the motions of the planets.

And initially, this idea wasn't very well received.

WRIGHT: The Copernican model

of the solar system went strongly against earlier models

that were heavily favored by the Catholic Church

because they made the Earth special.

With the Earth just one among many planets,

there was nothing special about it.

And so, that particular idea became,

in some places, a heresy

to even suggest that that might be

the correct model of the solar system.

SHATNER: In the wake of Copernicus's radical theory,

Italian philosopher Giordana Bruno

was burned at the stake in 1600

for declaring that the Sun is a star

and that stars are other suns with their own planets.

But it wasn't until the 20th century

that scientists finally answered the fundamental question:

What exactly is the Sun?

In her doctoral thesis,

a young British-American astronomer

named Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin proposes a bold new theory

about the composition of the Sun.

SUTTER: Since the mid-1800s,

astronomers debated what the Sun was made of.

Before Cecilia Payne,

astronomers had already identified some elements

on the Sun, like iron and magnesium and carbon.

And those elements are very common on the Earth.

So they wondered

if the Sun was simply a giant ball of molten rock.

Payne-Gaposchkin carefully analyzed

the spectrum of the Sun,

looking very carefully at how much light was blocked

in the Sun at different wavelengths,

and was able to show, to people's astonishment,

that the Sun was a big ball of hydrogen gas

at very high temperature.

This was such a huge shift and paradigm change

to now think that the Sun is not a solid body.

It's superhot gas that's not uniform.

This was something that a lot of scientists

at the time were very uncomfortable with.

But some of the astronomers of the day

considered this to be one of the greatest PhD theses ever.

SHATNER: In the 1960s,

astronomers successfully detected the source

of the Sun's seemingly limitless energy,

confirming that it is, in fact, a giant nuclear furnace.

VIALL: It's only been in the last few decades

that we've really started to understand how the Sun works.

Our Sun is just a star,

and that means that it's a giant ball of hydrogen.

And there's fusion going on

where the atoms are all slamming together,

making the energy, making the light that we see.

(birds chirping)

SUTTER: The Sun is at once the source of light,

heat and warmth, and ultimately of life on the Earth.

But the Sun is also so hot

that coming within four million miles

of the surface of the Sun itself

is instant death.

You are melted and evaporated in a flash.

SHATNER: The awesome power of the center of our solar system

is almost too terrifying to imagine.

And while astronomers continue to study our star

from the safety of Earth,

there is a probe hurling through space

on an exploration mission to make contact

with the surface of the Sun.

SHATNER: Seated atop a volcanic mountain

at an elevation of 10,000 feet

is the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope,

otherwise known as DKIST.

With a mirror measuring nearly 14 feet in diameter,

this state-of-the-art instrument

is designed to capture high-resolution images

of Earth's closest star, the Sun.

CLARK: The DKIST telescope

is the largest solar telescope, uh, on the Earth.

It's a four-meter mirror.

And it can take the most exquisitely detailed pictures

of the solar surface.

They're so vivid that it's also quite scary.

VIALL: The images from DKIST are so cool.

They are sort of like a microscope on the Sun.

And we can see details of granulation on the Sun,

detail that we have never before seen.

What has come out of DKIST just blew me away.

The detail of being able to see these sunspots,

solar flares, coronal mass ejections,

all of these various types of eruptions

that happen on the Sun.

It's allowing us to now get

some very, very specific information

about the impact that they have here on Earth.

SHATNER: But while DKIST is able to capture

remarkable images from the safety of our planet,

scientists are also curious about what data can be collected

by getting closer to our solar system's star.

YOUNG: We've been looking at the Sun in incredible detail

for many, many decades now.

But there's only so much you can learn

by looking at things from a distance.

Eventually, to really understand what's happening at the source,

you have to go there.

SHATNER: The prospect of getting anywhere near the Sun sounds impossible.

But recently, NASA has developed a robotic spacecraft

that is able to go where no man has gone before.

A Delta IV heavy rocket

carrying the Parker Solar Probe blasts into outer space.

Its mission is to fly closer to the Sun

than any spacecraft in history.

The Parker Solar Probe was an idea

that started in the 1950s,

around the same time the solar wind was predicted

by Eugene Parker, the spacecraft's namesake.

And its goal is to fly through the corona.

WRIGHT: The outermost layer of the Sun is called "the corona."

You can see parts of the corona of the Sun

during a total solar eclipse.

But what's been a big puzzle for a long time

is that the corona of the Sun can be millions of degrees,

much, much hotter than the Sun's surface.

And the exact mechanism by which the corona

gets so hot has been something of a mystery.

SHATNER: The surface temperature of the Sun

is estimated to be 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

But its outermost layer, or corona,

can reach an astonishing two million degrees.

It's very, very strange to think that the Parker Solar Probe

could not be obliterated by these kind of temperatures.

And so, in order to survive that,

there's a huge heat shield

that is about four and a half inches thick.

And instruments sit behind this heat shield.

And so engineers have figured out how to pull heat

away from the front of the spacecraft.

SUTTER: The Parker Solar Probe has not yet reached

its point of closeness approach.

But when it does, it will plunge

into the outer atmosphere of the Sun,

coming within four million miles

of the surface of the Sun itself.

That's seven times closer than the previous record holder.

And so it is designed from the ground up

to withstand the extreme temperatures

this close to the Sun.

SHATNER: The Parker Solar Probe and its instruments

can withstand temperatures

as high as 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

And in 2021, the spacecraft crossed a historic threshold

when it reportedly touched the Sun.

When we say that the Parker Solar Probe touches the Sun,

it didn't touch the visible surface.

But what it did touch is the transition

between the Sun and interplanetary space.

And Parker Solar Probe has now actually made

several passes in and out of this region,

now giving us the first

up close and personal measurements and understanding

of this critical region of the Sun's atmosphere.

VIALL: The chance to look at the Sun closer than ever before

really will offer a new opportunity

to understand the physics of how the Sun works

and how stars work throughout the universe.

SHATNER: Over the course of its seven-year mission,

the Parker Solar Probe will collect data

on solar wind, energy flow

and the explosive outermost part of the Sun's atmosphere

called "the corona."

Parker Solar Probe is now flying through the corona.

And this is important because,

ultimately, the corona is where this energy

is released that is producing what we call

"the coronal mass ejection" or CME.

ROD PYLE: CMEs are when the surface of the Sun

gets stirred up and some of the material below

gets churned up to the surface.

And these streamers can go millions of miles out into space

and let off a tremendous amount of ionizing radiation.

YOUNG: CMEs can create a spray of particles

close to the speed of light,

and this amounts to a very intense blast

of electromagnetic radiation.

And that is incredibly hazardous

and can heat up the Earth's atmosphere.

And we can feel how intense it is here on Earth.

The coronal mass ejection

can also disrupt power lines on Earth,

which can cause brownouts or blackouts.

So, the hope is that the Parker Solar Probe

is going to give us one more tool

to allow us to know when these events are gonna happen

and understand how strong they're gonna be.

SHATNER: Could the Parker Solar Probe help us predict

dangerous solar events, such as coronal mass ejections?

Let's hope so.

But scientists believe the probe could also shed light

on other mysteries,

like the largest solar storm to ever hit our planet.

SHATNER: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

releases an alert from the Space Weather Prediction Center.

A severe geomagnetic storm watch is underway

after a large sunspot cluster

produces a series of massive solar flares,

triggering an intense solar storm.

Solar storms are eruptions that happen on the Sun.

And these could be a solar flare...

...which is a very intense blast

of electromagnetic radiation, light,

over the entire spectrum,

from radio waves all the way to gamma rays

and everything in between.

But also, this huge blob of solar material

travels through space,

and it creates all kinds of electrical currents

and disturbances that we have here on Earth.

SHATNER: While NOAA's solar storm warning

prompts NASA to put at least one satellite in safe mode

and power down instruments on board other missions,

what the world witnesses is a stunning

astronomical event known as "the aurora borealis."

VIALL: When solar storms hit the Earth, then it can cause

the aurora borealis, which is a beautiful effect,

where you see these dancing green and purple

and red lights called "the northern lights."

What happened was the aurora, which usually you see

up in places like Alaska and Iceland,

all of a sudden came down very south.

SHATNER: The aurora borealis of May 2024

provided an unusually large sweep of colorful lights across

North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

And although it's considered a significant celestial event,

it was nothing when compared to the solar disturbance

that shocked the world over 150 years ago.

A spectacular display of pulsing illumination

blankets an unprecedented swath of the globe.

People around the world are both mesmerized and terrified

as they witness the effects of one of the largest

geomagnetic storms in recorded history.

CLARK: The eyewitness reports on September the 2nd, 1859,

are just extraordinary.

The aurora were blood red,

as described by the eyewitness accounts.

It was, um... I think it was a scary moment, actually.

In America, a number of people said that

they were woken in their beds by how bright it was

and believed that there were vast prairie fires

that were engulfing the country.

In Paris,

they described burning purple arches across the sky.

I mean, it's just absolutely apocalyptic.

SHATNER: The unnerving spectral display

was not the only concern shared by a confused public.

The strength of the solar flares

had a damaging and dangerous effect on mechanical devices

and electrical signals around the globe.

As this aurora was taking place overhead,

the compasses were just spinning uselessly.

And the telegraph lines, phantom electrical currents

were just surging in those wires.

The electricity was so great

that offices burst into flames

as the electricity surged in through the equipment.

Operators were stunned unconscious

by the electrical shocks.

It is terrifying because, in 1859,

that was the Internet of the day.

It would be the same today

as if all telecommunications stopped almost instantly

and no one had a single idea

why it had happened.

SHATNER: At the time, people wanted to know:

What could have caused such a bizarre series of events?

It was a mystery because, in the 1850s,

scientists were not yet aware that auroras,

which are normally seen only at night,

are produced by the Sun's energy.

But as luck would have it, on September 1st, 1859,

one day before the worldwide aurora took place,

a British man named Richard Carrington

was carefully studying the Sun.

CLARK: Richard Carrington was,

essentially, an amateur astronomer.

He was a very wealthy man because his family business

was to run a brewery, Carrington Brewery.

And he decided to use part of that family wealth

to set up an observatory to study sunspots.

Sunspots are slightly cooler areas

on the solar surface,

so they're not giving out quite as much light.

And so, when you see them in the context

of the rest of the solar surface, they just appear dark.

YOUNG: Carrington was observing a very, very large sunspot.

And while he was observing it,

what he noticed was the image became blurry all of a sudden.

And that was because

the sunspot all of a sudden got very bright.

CLARK: Carrington realized

no one had ever described seeing something like this

erupting from a sunspot before.

And a day later, the largest aurora

that has ever been witnessed on the Earth took place.

And the question was:

Were those two things linked?

SHATNER: Carrington proved that the incredible auroras

were connected to the intense solar activity he observed.

The phenomenon of September 1859

has come to be known as "the Carrington Event,"

in honor of his discovery,

and it remains the most powerful solar storm ever recorded.

The notion that the Sun can create solar flares

capable of inflicting danger here on Earth

is profoundly concerning.

And it naturally begs the question:

What if a geomagnetic storm

on the scale of the Carrington Event

were to hit our planet today?

The Carrington Event, if it were to happen again,

property damage would be about $2 trillion,

our astronauts would be endangered...

...satellites would be blinked out

because of the enormous radiation.

(static crackling)

Power plants on the Earth would go on the fritz.

And the economy could be thrown maybe 200 years into the past.

So we're talking about an event that would be

catastrophic for modern civilization.

SUTTER: In 2022, a solar storm struck the Earth

and managed to knock out 40 Starlink satellites.

The storm heated up

the upper layers of our atmosphere,

which actually caused too much drag on the satellites

and forced them to come plummeting

back down onto the Earth.

So, these high-energy events

can disrupt power grids.

They can short-circuit electronics.

They're just bad news.

SHATNER: The constant threat

of solar storms bombarding Earth is certainly unsettling.

Is there anything we can do to prepare ourselves

for an impending blast of destructive energy

from our normally peaceful star?

SUTTER: The best defense we have against solar storms is,

the more advanced warning we can get that a storm is on its way,

the more we can prepare ourselves.

We can shut down sensitive electronics.

We can move things underground.

We can hunker down while the storm passes.

Detecting solar storms before they reach Earth is one way

to protect us from our star's harmful flares.

But scientists warn

that we could face a much more dangerous scenario

if the Sun actually dies.

SHATNER: Throughout the United States,

Canada and Mexico,

millions of people wearing protective sunglasses

look up at the sky to witness a rare cosmic occurrence.

Over the course of several hours,

Earth's Moon slowly passes directly in front of the Sun.

As they become perfectly aligned,

the Moon completely blocks out the Sun for around four minutes,

making the sky appear as dark as night

-in the middle of the day. -(crowd cheering)

It's an event known as "a total solar eclipse,"

and it's an eerie glimpse

at what our world would be like without the Sun.

MICHAEL DENNIN: The interesting thing about solar eclipses is

that it is very strange to experience

kind of night during the day and to have the Sun blocked out.

And this is one of the reasons for most of history

that solar eclipses were somewhere between really scary,

or at least considered a sign

of something dramatic that was going to happen.

DOMINIC STEAVU: Historically all over the world,

in multiple civilizations and cultures,

a disappearance of the Sun would be considered catastrophic.

The Sun's a source of life.

So when the Sun darkened during the daytime,

that was seen as a very bad omen.

And solar eclipses, therefore, were often represented as events

in which the forces of darkness would consume the Sun.

They would eat it up, and...

it would be an apocalypse,

an end of the world for everyone,

where the forces of darkness would overtake life.

CLARK: The Sun shapes a lot more than just civilization.

The fact that we have this lush, green planet

with abundant life all over it comes directly from the Sun,

because it provides the energy

for living forms to function,

to grow, to reproduce.

And realizing

that the Sun is the key to life on Earth,

without it, we simply can't survive.

SHATNER: It's easy to see why our ancient ancestors believed

a solar eclipse was the end of the world.

But is it possible for the Sun's light

and energy to disappear?

According to experts, the answer is yes,

because one day,

the Sun will actually die.

VIALL: Our Sun is a middle-aged star.

The Sun is about four and a half billion years old.

And eventually, what'll happen is

it'll run out of fuel in its core.

And when it does that, then what happens is

it turns into something called "a red giant."

STANDING: As the Sun starts to run out of fuel

and expand into the red giant phase,

the outer layers of the star will puff out

and expand out to the solar system,

and then it will slowly fade over billions of years,

and it will eventually burn out.

SHATNER: It's fascinating to think

that the Sun will one day grow even larger than it is now.

But what impact will a red giant Sun have on Earth?

As the Sun reaches the end of its life,

it will swallow Mercury, it will swallow Venus.

Eventually, its radius will come out

to around about the orbital radius of the Earth.

The oceans will boil and disappear.

The Earth's atmosphere will be blown away.

And life will end on the Earth.

What will be left will be a very hot, very desolate planet.

SHATNER: Will the Sun one day grow so large

that it engulfs Earth and transforms it

into a scorched and barren wasteland?

Perhaps, but that's not the end of the Sun's story.

Experts claim that our star will still have one more phase

to go through before it finally goes dark for good.

The Sun will exist for a little while

as a red giant star.

But eventually, it will, rather violently,

shed its outer layers, which will drift away,

and all that will be left is the inner core,

called "a white dwarf."

It's like the ember in a dying fire.

And so, it will slowly radiate its energy away

and get cooler and cooler and cooler.

Eventually, the Earth's surface would rapidly cool.

It would be like it was suddenly night,

and it would just get colder and colder,

and eventually,

Earth would just become a giant snowball in space.

SHATNER: If it's true that Earth will first be burnt

and then frozen during the Sun's death,

then it begs the question:

Will this happen anytime soon?

While scientists believe it will be billions of years

before the Sun dies,

they also claim that there is evidence

this slow process has already started.

WRIGHT: You might think

that as a star starts running out of fuel in its core

that it would get dimmer and dimmer.

But the star actually slowly gets a little bit brighter

as it gets older.

And over the last four and a half billion years,

the Sun has slowly become brighter and brighter

and brighter by about 15% to 20%.

So, it's already running out of fuel in its core.

And that's a problem, because this trend will continue

into the future.

When the Sun dies, it'll certainly mean the end

for life on Earth.

Unless...

scientists are successful with a daring new experiment,

one that will use the power of stars

to create our very own version

of the Sun.

SHATNER: Experts from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

announce a groundbreaking achievement.

By firing powerful lasers at a microscopic target,

they were able to produce a nuclear reaction

that is referred to as "fusion ignition."

Remarkably, this is a miniature version

of the same reaction that generates light and heat

deep inside the Sun.

WRIGHT: Because the Sun is so massive,

at the core, the pressure gets so high

and the temperatures get so high

that the stars can actually fuse

atomic nuclei together, generating nuclear power.

And out will come enormous amounts of energy.

SUTTER: Stars are the only known places in the universe

that can sustain nuclear fusion reactions.

If we were able to develop nuclear fusion

here on the Earth--

and we've had some very promising gains

in recent years--

this would be a game-changer for humanity,

because then you can take simple elements,

feed them into a machine,

and get an almost limitless supply of energy.

SHATNER: Before the unprecedented success

of the 2022 experiment

at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,

creating self-sustaining power like the Sun

had been humanly impossible.

But now, inside a three-and- a-half-billion-dollar structure

known as the "National Ignition Facility,"

they are using the world's most energetic laser

to create miniature stars.

MA: The National Ignition Facility

is the world's largest laser.

It's the size of three football fields,

side by side, ten stories tall,

mostly to house the amplification optics,

to amplify the laser up

a million, billion times in energy.

And the laser is actually 192 separate laser beams.

We focus all of the laser beams back down onto a target

that is about a centimeter in length

and compress it up to the temperatures,

densities, pressures that actually exceed

what we have in the Sun

so that we can generate miniature stars

and harness that energy.

SHATNER: It's astonishing that scientists have managed

to create miniature stars in the lab.

But how does a tiny, artificial Sun

compare to the real thing?

When we create this miniature star on Earth,

we get to temperatures

that are about three to four times hotter

than the center of the Sun.

That's 100 million degrees Celsius.

But whereas the Sun is a million miles across,

in the laboratory, the stars that we create

are on the order of two one-thousandths of an inch,

about half the size of a human hair.

GORDON BRUNTON: We had a very successful experiment

that was the second highest yield

that we have ever achieved

on the National Ignition Facility.

And so, it proves the basis

for advancing the fusion, uh, process further

so that we can eventually work towards

actually having energy on the grid using this fusion process.

MA: By capturing our own stars

in laboratories here on Earth,

we could have energy security and energy sovereignty

for every country around the world,

because it is safe, it is clean.

There's no carbon anywhere in the fusion reaction.

It's sustainable.

And so, we can make life better for everybody.

SHATNER: Is it possible that nuclear fusion

and miniature stars will one day solve

the world's energy problems?

It's an exciting notion,

but perhaps what's even more intriguing

is that recreating the power of the Sun

could revolutionize space travel.

PYLE: If you can get fusion to work,

this is kind of the holy grail.

You get a lot of energy out of the fuel you're carrying,

and the solar system really becomes your backyard.

So, now missions to Mars can be six weeks or two months

instead of seven months.

You can come home sooner if you need to.

You've got the power to do that.

You could even start going beyond the asteroid belt

to some of the outer planets.

It's very dangerous out there, it takes a while,

but with fusion, you can actually make all this happen.

And that's ultimately where we're gonna want to be.

It's thrilling to think that in the future,

fusion power plants might provide a near limitless source

of energy to fuel our entire civilization

and even our spaceships.

But an even more extraordinary feat would be finding a way

to extend the life of the Sun.

SHATNER: Scientists have long known

that in the distant future, the Sun will die.

But according to a remarkable theory,

it might be possible

to extend the Sun's life almost indefinitely.

This concept is referred to as "star lifting."

SUTTER: Our Sun

has a finite lifetime.

It will die.

Its lifetime is determined

by how much hydrogen it has in its core

and how quickly it can fuse that hydrogen,

and eventually, it will simply run out of hydrogen.

STANDING: Star lifting is the idea

that as the Sun reaches the end of its life,

we could, in theory,

slow down its hydrogen burning rate

and prolong its lifetime.

WRIGHT: Astronomers have actually done the calculation

to see what would happen

if you did this sort of star lifting

and found that, for the Sun, you could eventually

get it to burn its fuel so slowly

that it could last maybe a trillion years.

SHATNER: Could star lifting allow the Sun

to continue burning for an unimaginably long time?

And if so,

how could we possibly achieve such an extraordinary feat?

As strange as it may sound,

proponents of star lifting theorize

that we can keep the Sun burning indefinitely

by removing some of its fuel to make it smaller.

WRIGHT: Stars burn

because gravity is constantly pushing down

and trying to crush a star.

It would be extremely difficult.

But imagine if you started lifting the mass

from the surface of the Sun.

The reason that would help is that a smaller star

burns fuel less quickly.

That would then extend the amount of fuel you had

and allow the star to last a lot longer.

SUTTER: Obviously, removing material from the Sun is going to be

a very challenging engineering problem.

But one thing we can use

are enormously strong magnetic fields.

The Sun is made of charged particles,

and if you can create a strong enough magnetic field,

you can pull material off of the Sun

and eject it out into space.

So if we could surround the Sun with very powerful magnets,

we could use them to drive plasma

off the surface of the Sun and out into space,

which allows the Sun to live longer.

SHATNER: Could lifting material from the Sun

actually prolong its lifespan and save Earth from destruction?

Perhaps.

But while scientists work to prevent the death of our star,

the Sun still holds many mysteries

that humanity has yet to solve.

YOUNG: The Sun has been part of mythology

and part of religion

for thousands and thousands of years,

because it is one of the only absolutes in civilizations.

And it's really amazing

that we are now making observations

that are providing a new look and a new understanding

of not only our Sun

but all the stars in the universe.

DENNIN: The Sun is still a mystery in many ways.

And it's really an exciting time right now,

because we have all these probes that we've sent to the Sun,

and for the next couple of years,

we're really at a peak activity for the Sun.

And so to be able to measure that at a time of peak activity,

this might be the time

where we can finally solve those mysteries.

It's profound to think that every living thing

that ever called Earth home has been touched by the Sun.

And even now,

the Sun continues to mystify us.

Will its flares burn us to a crisp?

Could it disappear someday?

And might we be able to recreate its awesome power?

It's fascinating to think about.

But even billions of years from now,

the Sun will remain...

unexplained.

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