Follow up on the recent post *”how can the sun just continuously burn and burn?*”
Can someone explain how the sun actually started its nuclear fission?
Oppenheimer did not go a dropped a nuke on it 😉
In: 1
The sun, and other stars, do not emit energy from nuclear fission, but nuclear fusion. This is where very simple atoms like Hydrogen collide into one another and fuse together. When they do that, they produce a tremendous amount of energy, including heat.
The fusion reaction is produced because there was an extremely large cloud of hydrogen and other elements in one region in space. Gravity pulled all of those elements together and condensed them into a (relatively) compact ball. The gravity pulled them together with enough force and pressure that a fusion reaction began – and has been going ever since. That ball of gas and its ongoing fusion reaction is Sol, our sun.
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