Thanks
In: Planetary Science
the sun is mostly hydrogen, very very hot and extremely dense hydrogen, so hot in fact it’s not even a gas anymore it’s a plasma, just one big soup of electrons and protons
now plasma exists on earth too, lightning is a great example, but remember the sun’s temperature in the core is unimaginably hot, so this means that basically the hydrogen atoms are flying around so fast they can sometimes smash into each other so hard that despite protons being naturally repelled they can combine together and with a couple of electrons too to form helium
now you might reasonably expect that atoms smashing together takes a lot of energy, and it does, but once it happens it gives a lot more energy put than you initially put in, because of all kinds of weird reasons I don’t fully understand helium is lighter than 4 hydrogen atoms, and the difference in weight (technically mass) is converted to energy, a lot of energy
Latest Answers