Question - what's it like standing on the surface of the sun?

This week's question comes from Mike Trotter in Baden, Ontario. He asks:

If we could stand on the surface of the sun, would we sink? And what would we see?

Raymond Carlberg, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto, gives the following answer:

The sun is a big ball of hot gas, so there's no solid surface to stand on. It would be like standing on a cloud.

The surface of the sun that we see is called the photosphere. It's actually a very thin layer of gas about 500 kilometers thick, which is why it looks like a surface compared with the large size of the sun.

There would not be a lot to see in the photosphere. It would be the colour of the sun in all directions, a little cooler upward than down.

A more exciting view would be above the photosphere, in the corona, which is very low density, but has a temperature of about 1,000,000K. The surface activity from the sun shoots up into the corona and it is where the solar wind starts to flow away from the sun.