You can’t live on the sun. Well, you can try if you want. I’m not your mother. 
NASA
NASA
Fantastically Wrong
It's OK to be wrong, even fantastically so. Because
when it comes to understanding our world, mistakes mean progress. From
folklore to pure science, these are history’s most bizarre theories.
Browse the full archive here.
Browse the full archive here.
But first, a bit of background on the years leading up to Herschel’s bold claim. The telescope was invented in the early 1600s, and was first turned skyward not by its inventors, who were concerned with more terrestrial applications (“seeing faraway things as though nearby,” as one patent application read), but by Galileo. Observations of the sun began almost immediately, and what followed was a sort of stargazing gold rush, as inventors developed ever more powerful devices, while of course remaining cautious not to burn their eyeballs out of their heads.
William
Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus, believer of life on the sun,
disapprover of paragraphs above and to the left of his person. 
Wikimedia
WikimediaIn reality, sunspots are areas where the star’s magnetic field becomes highly concentrated, inhibiting convective motion and therefore the transport of heat, dropping the temperature inside to thousands of degrees cooler than the rest of the surface. It’s still quite bright (if you could pull one out of the sun it’d glow brighter than a full moon), but in contrast to the surrounding hotter areas it appears dark. And that apparent ebbing tide exposing and enveloping mountains? It’s actually the sun’s shifting magnetic field opening up and closing new spots willy-nilly.
Anyway, along comes Herschel, who subscribes to the idea that sunspots can be either openings in the atmosphere exposing land or mountains rising above the luminosity. Scaling up the potential size of mountains on the sun using a mountain on Earth with a height of 3 miles, he gets a potential height of 334 miles, adding that “there can be no doubt but that a mountain much higher would stand very firmly”—unlike his theory as a whole, appropriately enough.
Sunspots utilize the time-tested buddy system, opening up in pairs as the sun’s magnetic field comes out of one and dives back into another. NASA
NASAAccording to Kawaler and Veverka in their essay, “it is clear that what especially attracted Herschel to this model of the sun were its philosophical implications,” since it brought the sun in league with other planetary bodies. “Clearly,” they add, “it is a product of Herschel’s prejudice that all planets are inhabited.”
It’s Getting Hot in Here, So Take Off All Your Preconceived Notions of Where Life Can Potentially Exist
It was prejudice that of course came with problems, both scientifically and existentially. While Herschel believed the sun to be inhabited “by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe,” at the same time he pointed out that “angry moralists” thought the star to be “a fit place for the punishment of the wicked,” while “fanciful poets” reckoned it was home to blessed spirits. Clearly not all parties could inhabit the same world without stepping on each other’s toes.And then there was the question of how the luminous atmosphere wouldn’t simply cook any life on the sun. Herschel argued that “heat is produced by the sun’s rays only when they act upon a calorific medium.” Substances that can be heated, you see, contain the “matter of fire,” as a flint can ignite gunpowder that already contains such fire. If light alone could cause heat, he reasoned, then you’d expect the top of our highest mountains, where light’s course is the least interrupted, to be quite hot indeed, when in fact they’re frigid. And because the sun emits such an incredible amount of light, it stands to reason that little of it is acting upon such a “calorific medium” to produce heat on the surface. There must be something chemically different about the surface and atmosphere of the sun.
According to Kawaler and Veverka, six years after he proposed this theory, Herschel returned with another reasoning of how life on the sun would keep from bursting into flames. The sun must have not just a luminous atmosphere, but an underlying layer of clouds so opaque that they bounce the light into space, protecting the inhabitants below.
Hans Bernhard/WikimediaAnd in 1801, the collapse of a building in Germany led humanity to see the sun in a totally new light. Joseph von Fraunhofer, an orphan and decidedly not a polymath, was trapped when the mirror and glass shop he apprenticed in crumbled. The crowd that gathered to witness the ensuing rescue included Prince Elector Maximilian Joseph IV, who took pity on von Fraunhofer, providing him cash and books to further his studies. Von Fraunhofer eventually made huge advances in lens-making and, more importantly for astronomy, invented the spectroscope, which was later used to determine the chemical makeup of the sun by analyzing its light.
What we then began to understand is that instead of featuring a surface for life to amble around upon, the sun is in fact comprised of hydrogen and helium gas. And later on in the early 20th century, scientists finally solved the mystery of the sun’s power: It is, as They Might Be Giants noted, a gigantic nuclear furnace. Specifically, it’s a nuclear fusion furnace, in which hydrogen atoms collide to produce not only helium, but astounding amounts of energy and sunburns on Earth.
Joseph von Fraunhofer shows off his fancy spectroscope to—if you can believe it—old white men.
Wikimedia
WikimediaThere’s also vast clouds of alcohol in space, by the way. Could life be floating around drunk in there? We’ll never know until someone foots the bill for putting me in a rocket to go and investigate. So please. Please someone put me in a rocket so I can go investigate.
References:
Herschel, W. (1795) On the Nature and Construction of the Sun and Fixed Stars. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 1795-01-01. 85:46–72
Kawaler, S. and Veverka, J. (1981) The Habitable Sun: One of William Herschel’s Stranger Ideas. Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Vol. 75, P. 46
(got on bbc )
