4 million tons a second is a lot of mass to be lost given enough time. Considering the fact that the sun is over four billion years old, does this mean that the sun was physically bigger when it formed?
What about a couple of hundred years ago? Or a few years ago? Could the suns loss of mass imply that it’s shrinking over time?
In: Physics
A bit off topic, but this is a good example of why infinity is a really hard concept to grasp. For instance, 1 to 2 is a big difference, but 50 to 51 is not, at least in our mind. It get weird the more you scale up too. That’s why we categorized and subdivide everything.
Mass an volume are not the same. The sun lose mass for the fusion of two Hidrogens, Let say hidrogen weigth 1 Unit, but the two hydrogen fusioned (liike dragon ball) becoms helium, and that weigth 1.5 so the 0.5 remaining unit is converted to energy.
In time, the volume also becomes bigger as the hidrogen is really tiny in size let say 0.2 but helium is 1.0 .
Over simplified but something like that is how fusion of elements works.
The quantity of element (H and He) in the sun it has been massive. From it humble beggining, If the sun was a dog, i’ll say it has one year old. and will live for another 20.
The mass essentially stays near the sun, nothing is escaping that gravity outside the forces that normally push things out.
The sun keeps the mass but dissipates heat, sound, and light. Lots and lots of light.
Follow up question – why doesn’t the entire Sun burn instead of only a very small amount at a time?
While it does do this, most of the mass isn’t lost but *converted* into other elements. The sun isn’t like a fire where it consumes its fuel but a reactor that changes it from one form into another with the byproduct being energy.
Yes. But the Sun is very very very large. So over its lifetime (~4.6B years give or take a few hundred million) it lost a neglibile portion of its mass; it will die first before any major change in mass in about 10B years or so….
The sun is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to the sun.
It’s so big that losing 4 million tons of mass a second is kindof like you you losing weight by exhaling. It’s so small that it doesn’t even count.
M calculator says that this would mean that the sun loses roughly 0.06% of its mass over its expected lifetime of 10 billion years.
With questions like this I like to write it out.
The sun loses 4,000,000,000kg of mass per second.
Or 174,000,000,000,000,000kg a year.
But it has a mass of 1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000kg
4 million tons is alot.
But the sun weighs 1.989 x 10^27 tonnes.
or
1.9 thousand million billion billion tonnes.
So it’s got a lot of mass to lose.
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