I'm a science communicator and host for Seeker.

And this is the Light Speed Learning Playlist,

all about solar energy.

You probably found your way here

by way of Seeker's awesome documentary series

with YouTube Originals

on the 2019 World Solar Challenge.

In that series, you'll get a chance

to join Veritasium's Derek Muller

on the ground in Australia with Seeker,

where 44 teams from around the world

compete in an incredible race across the Outback.

Teams of engineers and innovators

push their limits in their one-of-a-kind solar race cars

to cut across roughly 3,000 kilometers of desert

from Darwin to Adelaide, powered by the sun.

This is a tough race.

It is the premiere,

most difficult solar race in the world.

MAREN: It's got hot racing action,

pun intended,

daredevil driving, uncontrolled spin-outs,

and fiery crashes.

-It's got tears and triumph. -[ALL CHEERING]

And it features loads of innovative technology

from the latest solar arrays

to top-secret batteries,

to innovative aerodynamic design...

Which brings us to this Learning Playlist,

where we take a deeper dive

into the science and technology

behind the World Solar Challenge.

That's right. Over the next seven chapters,

with some help from Derek,

we are going to learn all about nuclear fusion,

understand how solar panels turn sunlight into energy,

go under the hood of a solar race car,

break down batteries and build better ones,

dig into aerodynamics

and finally, explore the future

of solar vehicles.

After watching the Light Speed Learning Playlist,

you'll be one of the foremost experts on solar power

from start to finish.

Or at the very least,

you'll have a pretty solid understanding of

how it all works.

And just a heads up, each chapter of our playlist

will build on the previous chapter.

So, although you can skip ahead,

and you're welcome to watch the playlist

in whatever order you choose,

you'll probably wanna watch in the order we've laid out.

So, let's start with a little brief

on what we know about the sun so far.

Travel back in time with me to sometime around 1223 BCE.

The oldest known record of a solar eclipse

is from around this time,

and was found in the ancient city of Ugarit,

in what is now modern day Syria.

Since then, our methods for studying the sun

have grown more and more sophisticated.

Now, it's kind of mind-blowing to realize that

up until a few decades ago,

our knowledge of the sun only came from observations

made from here on Earth,

which is approximately 150 million kilometers away.

And then came the Space Age.

In a little over six decades,

we've sent more than 8,000 satellites into space.

And there have been several important missions

undertaken specifically to help us

get a better understanding of our sun,

including the Ulysses mission,

the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory,

or SOHO,

The Genesis mission, Hinode,

and IRIS,

the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph.

These missions, along with several others,

allowed us to get

a much deeper understanding of our sun.

They gave scientists the opportunity

to collect an actual sample of the solar wind,

measure the sun's magnetic fields,

and uncover how solar material moves

through the sun's atmosphere.

More recently,

NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe.

The mission being to touch the sun

by flying into its corona,

that's the outermost part

of the sun's atmosphere,

providing us with a better understanding

of how heat and energy

move through the sun's corona

and what accelerates solar wind.

And even more recently,

the European Space Agency and NASA

launched the Solar Orbiter

to answer our fundamental question

about how the sun is able to create

and control the space environment

throughout our solar system.

Both of these missions

will get within Mercury's orbit, too.

And the Parker Solar Probe will get as close as

6.16 million kilometers to the sun,

which I know may not sound very close,

but keep in mind, that means that the Solar Probe

will be too close to the sun to directly image it.

Thanks to centuries of observations,

we actually know a lot about our sun.

We know that it's a yellow dwarf star

whose gravity helps

hold our solar system together.

We know its size,

we know that it's a giant ball of gas

composed mostly of hydrogen and helium,

which, when combined,

make up more than 98% of its mass.

And we even have a widely-accepted theory

for how the sun formed,

out of the collapse of that same giant,

rotating cloud of gas and dust

that formed the rest of our solar system.

But it's only been within the last 100 years

that we've come to understand

how the sun generates its power,

by a complicated process known as fusion,

which pretty much sustains all life on our planet.

To learn more about this amazing process,

stick around for the next chapter

of our Learning Playlists,

where we break down exactly how

the sun generates so much energy.