So what is the Sun made of?

The Sun is mostly hydrogen and helium, but also contains wery small quantities of lots of other elements.

Traces of the other elements such as oxygen, magnesium and iron give us the clues we need to find out what the solar atmosphere is like.

If you could take a sample from the Sun and look at what it contains, you would find something like this.

The coloured dots represent different elements.

Yes, of course, good old hydrogen and helium

Look at the other coloured dots, these represent other elements. Actually it's very difficult to show such tiny proportions of the elements in a plot like this.

Here's a table to make things easier.

Element	Symbol	Number of atoms
Hydrogen	H	100 000
Helium	He	9 780
Carbon	C	35
Oxygen	O	74
Iron	Fe	3

Now you should be able to see what elements the yellow and blue dots in the picture were.

Less than one-tenth of 1% - pretty small!

Here are some images obtained with SOHO. They show the the ultraviolet light from different elements at different temperature.

Do you see the white disk in the top, middle image? That's the size of the Earth drawn to the same scale. The structures we see in the Sun's atmosphere are very large!