How can the sun emit so much energy every second for billions of years without running out of “fuel”?
In: Physics
It will run out of fuel. The sun is currently about halfway through its main-sequence lifecycle. In about 5 billion years, the sun’s core hydrogen will be exhausted and the sun will start expanding into a red giant. After about a billion years as a red giant, the sun will begin to shrink and eject mass over the course of a few tens of millions of years. That ejected mass will form a planetary nebula, which will disperse over about 10,000 years, leaving behind a white dwarf.
Nuclear fusion. People also really underestimate, or just outright can’t comprhend how big the sun is.
It’s 330,000 times the mass of the earth. It’s a nuclear power plant larger than you could possibly imagine. The earth is like a pin head and the sun is a giant farris wheel. thats how radically large it is.
The sun (Sol) is almost unimaginably big. There is *a lot* of “fuel”.
Also, nuclear fusion is a very efficient way of releasing energy, especially compared to fire/combustion.
The sun is crazy big, stupid big, impossibly big. There are stars out there that are much bigger though, even more crazy, stupid, impossibly bigger. If you’d like to see some size comparisons check out this video. https://youtu.be/GoW8Tf7hTGA
It’s seriously hard for human beings to even imagine how big the sun is. When things get that big the numbers don’t really do it justice. here is a passage from a quick google search:
The total volume of the sun is 1.4 x 1027cubic meters. About 1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun. The mass of the sun is 1.989 x 1030 kilograms, about 333,000 times the mass of the Earth. The sun contains 99.8 percent of the mass of the entire solar system.
Leading astronomers refer to the solar system as “the sun plus some debris”
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