Shadowing Practice: The Sun Is Weirder Than You Think - Learn English Speaking with Video

If you dove into the sun, the first layer you'd hit is hot enough to make diamonds boil.

If you keep going, you're passing through churning bubbles the size of France.

And then you're lost in a zone so dense that light itself takes 170 ,000 years to escape.

And you're still not at the place where it unleashes enough energy to power all life on Earth.

Right now, we're in a golden age of new solar science.

We're getting close -up pictures of the sun's surface in more detail than ever before, sending probes into its atmosphere,

and revealing secrets about our star we never thought possible.

Trust me, after this video, you'll never look up at the sun the same way.

So let me take you on a journey into the sun.

This episode was made possible by AT &T, the official connectivity partner of Huge If True.

A lot of people picture the sun as a giant ball of fire, but that's totally wrong.

There's nothing actually burning up there.

Imagine you and I get into a magical spaceship and blast off toward the sun.

As soon as we get about six times Earth's diameter away, our little ship is starting to detect something.

We think we're on a journey into the sun, but really, is it true to say that in some sense we are inside the sun right now?

Oh, 100%.

That is the head of heliophysics at NASA.

He's in charge of all of NASA's research on the sun.

And he's saying, if you zoom out to see our whole solar system, and then zoom a little bit further,

you'd see that our sun's outer atmosphere actually swallows Earth and then keeps going.

This is the heliosphere, and it's huge.

It goes about a hundred times farther than the distance between Earth and the sun.

We are living not just with a star, but living in a star's atmosphere, which is pretty cool.

As we fly through it, we see that the heliosphere is made of the sun blasting out these charged particles more

and more as we fly toward it.

From here, Here we can see so much cool tech that humans have sent to study the sun before us.

We already passed around 40 satellites orbiting Earth studying the sun.

And now we're speeding past a very special one.

This is the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

It's snapping pictures of the sun in all these different wavelengths.

It's one of the biggest data sets that we have at NASA.

And it's frankly the beating heart of watching the sun every day and its activity and its changes.

But we keep going closer.

And there are still two spacecraft ahead of us.

The two of them are Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe.

Solar Orbiter is a big deal because it took the first -ever pictures of the Sun's South Pole.

For scale, here's how big the Earth would be in this video.

But only one spacecraft has ever gone into the Sun's inner atmosphere.

At this point, our little ship is starting to feel more of the Sun's effects.

Uh, that can't be good.

But we need to keep going, because the Sun is way farther away than most people think.

If you paused the whole solar system at the closest point with a normal walking pace,

it would take you over 3 ,000 years to reach the Sun.

You could line up all of the planets between the Earth and the Sun 374 times.

But it's not just the distance that's the problem.

The Earth is rapidly moving sideways compared to the Sun.

So to get there, we have to cancel that out, which would take more energy than it would take to escape the entire solar system.

That's why when NASA sent the Parker Solar Probe, it took over six years to spiral inward until 2021,

when it crossed into the corona.

This is the sun's inner atmosphere.

It's the part that you see during a solar eclipse, and it's beautiful.

But up close, it's terrifying.

When Parker first crossed into it, the probe was still about nine times farther from the sun than the sun itself is wide.

But Parker's been making passes closer and closer, faster and faster ever since.

It's now the fastest object humans have ever made.

It could get from London to Paris in two seconds.

But funny enough, the scientists who made it don't actually like that.

And I don't like it.

I would like to slow down.

I want Parker to spend as much time as possible very close to the sun

so we can get all the wealth of the data.

The data suggests that our sun's corona is over a million degrees Celsius.

How is the Parker Solar Probe not melting?

In some sense, this is not a real temperature.

To actually feel the heat, you're going to need a lot more particles.

Turns out that commonly cited number is sort of a lie.

The charged particles that make up the corona are moving insanely fast, and how fast particles are moving is what we're really measuring when we say temperature.

But lucky for Parker, there are very few of those particles.

In fact, so few that the scientists who built Parker don't really care about these particles that much.

We are not worried about it.

We can actually sneak out instruments into that flow and it doesn't do anything.

The heat they do worry about is the same heat and energy that we use here on Earth, Earth, which comes from the light itself.

The only thing that really hurts Parker is when the solar surface heat, like this big radiating lamp, can shine directly on the sensitive parts.

Light, or more specifically photons, carries the sun's energy across the vacuum of space toward us.

But this close?

Sunlight is hundreds of times more intense than it is on Earth.

That's why Parker hides all of its scientific equipment behind this very thick heat shield.

They would do these demos on this carbon -carbon composite.

You'd take a blowtorch, and you would hold it there as long as you wanted, and then ask everybody to touch the back of the darn thing, and the back was ice cold.

As it flew through the corona, Parker recorded something incredible.

Sounds coming from the sun.

There were these chirping sounds, and this weird sound, and these hissing sounds.

But if you're thinking, hey, you can't hear things in space, there's no air, you're right.

These sounds are actually electric and magnetic waves that scientists then converted into sound waves.

They're the sounds of intense solar wind from those same charged particles

that the sun is constantly blasting out to create the heliosphere.

The whooshing sound comes from changes in the speed of that solar wind.

The layered pitches represent changes in the temperature.

When it gets hotter, the pitch gets higher.

And when there's a particularly big explosion called a solar storm, everything gets louder.

Those solar storms can get really dangerous for us on Earth.

And scientists today say that we should be getting ready for a big one soon.

In 1859, the Sun released a large blast of particles that shot out and raced toward the Earth.

It took under a day to travel over 150 million kilometers and slam into our planet, causing the largest solar storm ever recorded.

It resulted in dark red northern lights that could be seen as far as the tropics.

Luckily, on Earth, life is protected by our own magnetic field.

It deflects most of those charged particles.

So these storms don't affect life on Earth, but they do affect technology.

The sun goes through cycles of activity that last about 11 years.

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If the sun cycle is at the top of this graph.

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It basically means that it's throwing a tantrum.

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It's got flares and eruptions and storms, lots of charged particles coming at us.

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If it's at the bottom, it's basically napping.

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Today, we're about here, and we've been seeing visible signs of it.

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Quite frightening, isn't it?

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That's one reason why studying the sun is so crucial, both for our future on Earth and for our future in space.

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Because on the Moon or Mars, there's no strong magnetic field to hide behind.

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So off -world, these storms could mean dangerous doses of radiation.

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We're going to establish a moon base, we're going to put boots on Mars.

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I want to be able to tell them, you can go on Expedition X for this many hours,

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days, and be able to say with confidence that they're going to be able to do that without risking their lives.

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The Parker Solar Probe could only get here, but our ship is magically protected.

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So we're going deeper.

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As our ship approaches the surface, we notice something very weird.

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Wait, why is it getting colder?

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To go further, it's time to breach the surface of the sun.

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This is the photosphere.

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Particles here are moving slower, so it's actually a cooler temperature.

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Here, the temperature is 5 ,500 degrees Celsius, hot enough to boil diamonds.

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So atoms are getting ripped apart into plasma.

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And all around you is boiling and roiling bubbles of gas constantly moving.

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And we just got the most detailed look ever.

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These extreme close -ups were taken by the newest and most powerful solar ground telescope in the world.

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What's truly crazy is the scale in these images.

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You could fit.. the entire earth right here.

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In this photo, each of these bubbles is the size of France,

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and sometimes you might see a sunspot, darker, cooler, and whiter than our whole planet.

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And in 1795, these sunspots led to a bit of confusion.

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So one of the most famous astronomers at the time, Sir William Herschel wrote this paper that said that sunspots might be openings

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that reveal the sun has a solid surface that could be inhabited by the sun people.

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Now we know that these sunspots are actually cooler patches where the sun's magnetic field is

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so strong it's choking off the heat rising from below.

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So no sun people.

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But with our protected craft, we're still going deeper through the photosphere, into the convective zone.

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This is a boiling ocean of plasma, rising and cooling and sinking like a giant churning pot.

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The motion is similar to our own mantle inside Earth, but where that's a slow -moving solid, this is a fast -moving, superheated gas.

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Now the heat is rising again, back up to 2 million degrees.

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And inside our little ship, we feel this.

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There are a lot more atoms hitting us now.

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But as we travel inward, suddenly, everything stops.

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You go about 30 % inside the sun, and then the gas ceases to flow.

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From the surface of the sun to us back on Earth, light or photons travel straight through the vacuum of space in an 8 minute and 20 second journey.

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But in here, the plasma is so dense that light itself gets trapped, bouncing around like a pinball machine that takes,

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on average, 170 ,000 years to escape.

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So when you step outside and you feel the sun on your face, that energy has been traveling since before humans wore clothes.

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We're now lost in the radiated zone.

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But wait, if the closest we've ever been to the sun was way out there in the corona, how do we know what's going on way down in here?

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That is her job.

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You know there are people who study earthquakes and use earthquakes to study the earth?

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I use quakes on the sun to study what's happening inside.

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So when there's an earthquake on our planet, it sends pressure waves down through the earth that act differently depending on what they're moving through.

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So scientists collect data on the surface to understand what's in between.

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Same idea in the sun, but instead of earthquakes, it's… music.

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Think of a drum.

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So these violent, boiling outer layers of the sun are constantly jiggling the inside parts with pressure waves, like earthquakes through the earth.

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And the jiggles of pressure waves is also called sound.

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The sun is a musical instrument that plays many, many notes.

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If we could hear the music, the different notes would tell us what the waves were traveling through.

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The problem is that we're 150 million kilometers away with a big vacuum in between that sound can't travel through.

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So it's more like, there's a drum playing in a soundproof room, if you have a good enough instrument,

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you'll see the surface of the drum moving even if you don't hear it.

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And by analyzing how the surface of the drum moves, you can figure out the tones and overtones.

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The boiling motion of the sun makes sound that travels through it, jiggling the surface just a little bit.

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And then scientists look at how the color of the light shifts, bluer as the surface moves towards us,

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and redder as it moves away and then translate that with math into what must be in the middle of the sun.

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So the boiling of the outer layers creates sound waves inside the sun

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which jiggles the surface which we can then see from 150 million kilometers away with using red

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and blue light to see how it moves on the surface

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and then use math to translate what must be inside the middle of the sun.

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Oh my god it's so complicated and so cool and they call it helioseismology.

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But what if we go deeper.

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Now we're finally entering the core.

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The pressure around us now is equivalent to about 250 billion of Earth's atmosphere.

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The stuff right outside our ship is 13 times denser than lead,

175

but it's so hot that even something that dense is still not solid.

176

And if you could zoom into this plasma to see the bare hydrogen nuclei inside, you'd see them smashing together.

177

Four hydrogen nuclei go in, one helium atom comes out that weighs just a tiny bit less.

178

About 0 .7 % becomes energy.

179

This is nuclear fusion, and it is the source of all of the sun's energy.

180

About 600 million metric tons of hydrogen fused into helium every second, with 4 million tons of matter converted straight into energy.

181

Those numbers sound huge, because they are.

182

But what's really weird is, in terms of how much energy is generated per cubic meter, the sun's output is actually tiny.

183

It's roughly similar to To a lizard's metabolism, your body, pound for pound,

184

generates more energy than the core of the sun.

185

But the sun is way bigger than you think.

186

How many Earths do you think you could fit inside the sun?

187

Assume you keep them round?

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960 ,000.

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And if you melted them to get rid of the extra space?

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1 .3 million.

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But what happens when one day our sun uses up all of its fuel?

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When will our sun die?

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Is it halfway through its lifetime?

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Is it near the end?

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Well, you can map out all of the stars that we've ever seen, and you'd get this famous chart showing a star's birth to death.

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The sun is now here, where it'll spend most of its life.

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As stars like ours age, the core uses up its hydrogen fuel and then shrinks, creating heat and pressure that push the outer layers outward,

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growing into a red giant.

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It'll get so big, it'll engulf Mercury and Venus and maybe even Earth.

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Then, about a billion years after that, it'll use up all its helium fuel and collapse into a white dwarf, cooling and dimming over billions more years.

201

Is the sun a teenager?

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Is the sun a middle -aged person?

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It's a middle -aged star it's four and a half billion years old

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and now we are at the very center of our sun

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the middle of the biggest thing in our solar system that powers all life we know about

206

there's still a lot

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that we don't know about the sun like why the 11 -year cycle nobody knows

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or understands why that is our knowledge of solar activity

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and how it impacts us on the earth It's a puzzle with a solution, but which we don't know the solution yet.

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But what we do know is the result of so much human work.

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So the next time you go out and you look up at the sun.

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Think about where that photon came from.

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I think about that and it just gives me immense joy.

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And remember that we're a tiny species on a tiny rock orbiting a star we owe everything to.

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And so we figured out how to send probes, and listen to its music, and take unbelievable pictures to protect ourselves from it,

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and slowly reveal its mysteries.

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HUGE IF TRUE If you want there to be more optimistic science and tech stories,

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subscribe to support our show, HUGE IF TRUE And remember, this episode was made possible by AT &T, the official connectivity partner of Huge If True.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 217 sentences and 2845 words to shadow. The speech runs for 18:14. The speaker talks at a natural 156 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

particle /ˈpɑɹtək(ə)l/ (noun) — A very small piece of matter, a fragment; especially, the smallest possible part of something.
probe /pɹoʊb/ (noun) — Any of various medical instruments used to explore wounds, organs, etc.
boil /bɔɪ(ə)l/ (verb) — To heat to the point where it begins to turn into a gas.
atmosphere /ˈætməsˌfɪɹ/ (noun) — The gases surrounding the Earth or any astronomical body.
layer /ˈleɪ̯ɚ/ (noun) — A single thickness of some material covering a surface.
earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/ (noun) — A shaking of the ground, caused by volcanic activity or movement around geologic faults.
blast /blæst/ (noun) — A violent gust of wind (in windy weather) or apparent wind (around a moving vehicle).
magnetic /mæɡˈnɛtɪk/ (adjective) — Of, relating to, operating by, or caused by magnetism.
drum /ˈdɹʌm/ (noun) — A percussive musical instrument spanned with a thin covering on at least one end for striking, forming an acoustic chamber; a membranophone.
dense /ˈdɛns/ (adjective) — Having relatively high density.
hydrogen /ˈhaɪdɹəd͡ʒ(ə)n/ (noun) — The lightest chemical element (symbol H), with an atomic number of 1 and atomic weight of 1.008.
plasma /ˈplæzmə/ (noun) — A state of matter consisting of partially ionized gas and electrons.
reveal /ɹɪˈviːl/ (verb) — To uncover; to show and display that which was hidden.
instrument /ˈɪnstɹəmənt/ (noun) — A device used to produce music.
bubble /ˈbʌbəl/ (noun) — A spherically contained volume of air or other gas in a liquid, commonly a soapy liquid.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

come from (verb) — To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.
figure out (verb) — To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
go about (verb) — To busy oneself with.
go on /ˈɡoʊˌɒn/ (verb) — To continue in extent.
think about /ˈθɪŋk əˌbaʊt/ (verb) — To ponder.
use up (verb) — To consume, deplete, expend, or exhaust.
bounce around (verb) — To discuss or brainstorm (ideas) on a topic.
burn up (verb) — To catch fire and burn until destroyed.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 49 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, don't, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, thick /θɪk/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/, shield /ˈʃild/, crucial /ˈkɹuː.ʃəl/, radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/, explosion /ɛkˈsploʊ.ʒən/
Long words — get the stress right: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, diameter /daɪˈæmɪdɚ/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like particle, probe, boil.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	we've been seeing · has been traveling
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was made · is made · could be seen
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have sent · has ever gone · have ever made
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	atmosphere, which is · people who study

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?