sunburned wrote:
I don't have time to figure out what the hell that says, as clever as you may assume it to be.
Anyway, what is the source of all the hydrogen that is converted to helium via fusion?
You should probably start researching your own high school science papers instead of expecting us to do it.
sunburned wrote:
Monotony wrote:Are you smarter than a 5th grader?
Yes I am, but apparently you are not if you're listening to that stuff. Time to grow up.
Actually, They Might Be Giants are fairly well known for having a huge adult fan base while still being able to perform educational songs for a child crowd as well. It's kind of like how Madonna wrote a book on her wild sexual affairs and later also published a children's novel...covering the markets I say.
TrackBunny wrote:
Actually, They Might Be Giants are fairly well known for having a huge adult fan base while still being able to perform educational songs for a child crowd as well. It's kind of like how Madonna wrote a book on her wild sexual affairs and later also published a children's novel...covering the markets I say.
This is simply not true.
The bigger questions are: Where did everything come from? The Big Bang you say. Well, where did the matter for the Big Bang come from? What existed before that matter came into existence? How big is the universe and what exists beyond it? Is there intelligent life in the universe besides Earth? How did everything happen to fall into place by pure chance? Quite a leap of "faith" when you consider all of the systems in the human body for starters. And what is the difference between a live human and a dead human? Is there life after death? And why do the oceans stay in place when the world is round? Gravity you say..hmm..And why don't we feel like we are walking upside down or at several degrees off horizontal? And why do we need to know all these answers? Mind boggling...I guess I'll just go out for a run!
Other people have answered this, but I'd like to point out that this is a very, very good question and caused scientists some small amount of concern in the years before the atom was well understood. Various ideas were tossed around including the sun being heated by burning coal (or some other hydrocarbon), gravitational compression, or just plain old stored heat. However, it was known that the sun had to be (at least) several hundred million years old and these couldn't get us much past ten million. When nuclear decay was discovered Ernest Rutherford suggested this as a mechanism, and when Einstein came up with his famous E=mc^2 we had the answer: fusion. Hydrogen atoms fuse together and form helium with some left over energy that turns into heat (there is also some helium fusion and, later on, fusion of higher elements. That won't happen until the sun is getting towards the end of its life).
Intreresing article in today's NY Times about astronomers who happened upon a star, perhaps 20 times the size of the Sun and 88 million light-years away, as it began to become a Supernova.
The star that died last January could have been 20 times as massive as the Sun or even bigger, Dr. Soderberg said. It was probably a type called a Wolf-Rayet star. They are very hot stars with surface temperatures of 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit or more and are often blowing gas away in strong winds. Dr. Soderberg described them as “very violent stars, very massive.”
Because it is gravity that stokes the thermonuclear furnace at the centers of stars, the more massive they are, the younger they die. In the case of a star 10 or 20 times as massive as the Sun, it could be only a few million years. “These stars live fast and die young. We don’t know if they leave a beautiful corpse,” Dr. Kirshner said.
Many of the elements necessary for life and its accessories, like carbon, oxygen, iron and gold, are produced in a thermonuclear frenzy during the final stages of these explosions, which then fling them into space to be incorporated into new stars, new planets, new creatures.
“If you’re wearing gold jewelry,” Dr. Kirshner said, “it came from a supernova explosion.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/science/22nova.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin
yetanotherchick wrote:
sunburned wrote:I don't have time to figure out what the hell that says, as clever as you may assume it to be.
Anyway, what is the source of all the hydrogen that is converted to helium via fusion?
You should probably start researching your own high school science papers instead of expecting us to do it.
I didn't study anything about the sun in high school, hon, and even if I had I wouldn't have the text or the notes from so long ago. I took biology as a freshman, chemistry as a sophomore, and physics as a senior.
jeffery wrote:
sunburned wrote:Anyway, what is the source of all the hydrogen that is converted to helium via fusion?
hydrogen makes up about 75% of the matter in the universe, mostly tied up in stars or clouds (that may become stars).
where the matter in the universe came from is tougher to answer. the big bang will need to be a sufficient answer.
Cool, so the sun can continually draw in hydrogen from space?
srsly? wrote: the sun is just an enormous mass of hydrogen and helium. By enormous I mean bigger than anything you can comprehend.
Let's not get carried away, sunny boy.
http://sizeofworldse.ytmnd.com/Idiot! It is clever, but obviously above your head. It is a reference to the previous World Cross Country Meet(Grassenhillerspielerchampionshippenzeevurlder)
in the Horn of Africa during the Spring. It was "inexplicably" really hot and humid. Malmo explained to the head man from Germany how the sun works in his excellent German, having spent dozens of hours there during the summer track circuit in the 70's.
The source of all the helium is The Big Bang.
Push on thru wrote:
he Earth is inhabitable for about another 1/2 billion years before the temperature of the sun increases too much and the water on Earth's surface evaporates.
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Does this mean that the Sun is gradually emmitting more solar energy to the earth?
If all the water is evaporated at 500million years, what will the earths temp be at 250 million yrs. Close to the boiling temp of water?
If the Sun begins to emit more solar energy cuz the exterior mass lessens wont that result in a collapse very quickly?
Just asking
The sun's radiation increases proportional to the amount of helium in it's core. As hydrogen is continually used in fusion reactions the amount of helium in the core increases. So even as we speak the amount of radiation leaving the sun is increasing. It isn't a quick collapse because both will be used as fuel as there is still hydrogen around. The big change won't happen until the sun becomes a supernova, but that will be far after the oceans and water on earth have evaporated. What will eventually happen is the radiation will cause more and more water of the ocean to evaporate into the atmosphere. The increase will occur slowly, but eventually it will spiral into a quick pace as the water in the atmosphere acts as a greenhouse gas to trap even more of the already increased radiation as heat. The oceans will evaporate and life on earth will be over. A few billion years later the sun's core will become completely helium and it will explode into a supernova.
As for the temperature change, it will take hundreds of millions of years and will be compounded by the amount of gas in the atmosphere acting as a greenhouse gas to trap more and more heat.
srsly? wrote:
The Earth is inhabitable for about another 1/2 billion years before the temperature of the sun increases too much and the water on Earth's surface evaporates.
Where did you get that value from? I am not an astronomer, however I am a grad student studying evolutionary biology, to which this is somewhat relevent. This value is much more conservative than any estimates I have come across in reviewed literature.
skwilli wrote:
The source of all the helium is The Big Bang.
Sehr gut, mein Freund.
Sorry, buddy. IIRC you were a biology major, so it's understandable...
The source of all the helium is nuclear fusion in the sun's core. The source of the hydrogen is the big bang. (Simplified of course.)
Will we see you at Ship Saturday?
The Sun has a lot of matter in it. That's why it is able to produce its own energy. The fact that there isn't even more matter in the Sun will allow it to remain fairly stable in its energy production longer than a more massive object would.
By our standards, the Sun is extraordinarily large. It has a diameter of about 864,000 miles. That's basically 109 times the diameter of the Earth. To put our near space in perspective, if there was a scale model of the solar system with the Sun having a diameter of one foot (about the size of a yellow-whitish basketball), the Earth, in order to remain to scale, would have to be placed 107 feet away and would be one-ninth of an inch across - a mere cinder speck roughly the size of a pinhead. The planet Jupiter would be an inch-and-a-half in diameter (about the size of a golf ball) on this scale and would be 557 feet away from the central basketball-sized Sun. Neptune, the outermost planet (not counting Kuiper belt objects or "dwarf planets" such as Pluto), would be just over 3,220 feet (nearly a kilometer) from the Sun on this scale. On this same scale (with a one-ninth-of-an-inch-wide Earth), the next nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, would be about the size and color of a tomato and would be a staggering 5,500 miles away. This illustrates the virtual emptiness of space and why other individual stars don't generally exert gravitational influence on the Sun or any of the minor members of the solar system, such as planets and comets.
The Sun is the only significant mass within 25 trillion miles (in actual distance, not to any scale). Because of this, it theoretically holds gravitational sway up to a distance over 1,000 times farther than the orbit of Neptune (this incredible distance is still barely a tenth of the way to Proxima Centauri). The true nature of gravity is not really understood, but a simple model of it has massive objects (like the Earth is to us or the Sun is to the Earth) creating "dents" in space and time, much like a bowling ball would create a depression in the center of a trampoline, causing objects close enough to the bowling ball to roll toward it. This curvature of space actually causes light to follow a bent path when it passes a massive object. Proof of this was first borne out in 1919, when stars known to be "behind" the Sun in an Earthbound observer's line of sight were actually visible to the "sides" of the Sun during a total solar eclipse.
In space, bits of nearby matter tend to coalecse, attracted to each other by gravity like bits of fluff drawn to each other via static electricity. When enough matter (make that a huge amount, in our terms - even gigantic Jupiter isn't nearly massive enough to become a star) coalesces, the pressure created at the center causes a rise in temperature (specifically, increased molecular movement). Light elements, such as Hydrogen (by far the most abdundant element in the universe), tend to exhibit a great deal of movement when under pressure, much like water becomes "agitated" when it begins to boil. It is these high pressures within the cores of stars that results in stellar nucleosynthesis, "fusion" of lighter elements into heavier ones, with an accompanying release of energy, as occurs in a Hydrogen bomb, with the conversion of matter to energy related by Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2. The core of a star like the Sun might be thought of as uncountable numbers of H-bombs exploding all the time. The rate of fusion within stars is actually slow on account of the fact that fusion energy is also absorbed within the star's core and it may take up to millions of years for a single burst of energy to make its way to the star's surface following the initial reaction. But the enormous amount of matter involved ensures a steady source of potential reactions and a stable energy output for a time frame ranging from hundreds of thousands of years (for extremely massive stars) to tens of billions of years (for the lightest stars).
More massive, dense stars exhaust their supply of convertible matter faster than less massive stars do. This is due in part to greater core pressure and a faster rate of nucleosynthesis and in part to matter comprised of heavier elements (a result of fusion) piling on top of the shrinking core, which eventually disrupts the balance achieved when internal nuclear turmoil and collapsing gravitational forces remain in equilibrium. A stable, "healthy" star in the normal state of equilibrium is called a "main sequence" star. The mass, color, surface temperature, energy production (luminosity) and life span of main sequence stars are all related, with the most massive stars being the hottest and most luminous and tending to produce energy in the visible spectrum which tends toward the violet end of the spectrum. These massive stars also have the shortest life spans as main sequence stars. The most common main sequence stars are small, dim and red and have the longest life in the main sequence. The Sun is dwarfed by many of the stars visible to the naked eye (such as Sirius, Vega, Antares, Aldebaran, etc.), but it is actually more massive than most stars. For every star of the Sun's size in the galaxy, there are probably about 30 smaller, dimmer, red stars that are not luminous enough to be visible to the naked eye in the night sky.
A star of the Sun's mass can theoretically be expected to remain on the main sequence for about 8 billion to 10 billion years, so it is thought to be roughly halfway through its life span at the moment. Stellar evolutionists look at stars in what they assume to be different stages of "life" and make conjectures as to how stars are "born," how long they can be expected to remain in normal balance as main sequence stars, and how they will eventually "die." Observing a single star age over the course of recorded history would be equivalent to trying to figure out how humans age by watching one for a few seconds, so the first approach, while more theoretical, is also more practical.
When our Sun begins its "death throes," it is theorized that it will expand (rapidly, in cosomological terms) into a "red giant" (no longer considered a main sequence star) which will likely engulf the Earth and possibly even Mars, then it will shed its outer layers and shrink to a "white dwarf," a smouldering "ember" of a star incapable of further nucleosynthesis (also not on the main sequence). Both red giants and white dwarf stars are well-represented in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so this end is known to be one possible stellar fate. Stars that are significantly more massive than the Sun are rare, but they are still numerous in the enormous Milky Way galaxy. These stars exhaust their "nuclear furnace" much faster than the Sun or the smaller red main sequence stars, and they may have more violent ends, some exploding into spectacular supernovas, the remnants of which form expanding nebulas with rapidly spinning "neutron stars" or even "black holes" at the center. These objects are impossibly dense. An ordinary drinking glass full of neutron star matter would outweigh the entire Earth. A black hole is so dense that even light cannot escape its gravity.
Well, those weren't simple terms, but there isn't exactly a simple explanation available. Now go read the first two sentences again for the simplest explanation possible.
sunburned wrote:
Yes I am, but apparently you are not if you're listening to that stuff. Time to grow up.
Most fans of They Might Be Giants are quite a bit smarter than you, make more money than you, and are cooler than you to boot.
Thanks
TMBG wrote:
sunburned wrote:Yes I am, but apparently you are not if you're listening to that stuff. Time to grow up.
Most fans of They Might Be Giants are quite a bit smarter than you, make more money than you, and are cooler than you to boot.
I would surmise that the OP has never heard much music by TMBG. They are an acquired taste, far from mainstream, and very talented. Your first 2 assertions have a very high probability of being correct. I have never met the OP but his posts reveal enough about him to suggest that your third statement is true as well.
(Shall we take up a collection to buy Webb a big prosthetic forehead or a purple toupee?)
sunburned wrote:
I mean, what's really going on up there and why hasn't it (sunburned's brain) burned out yet? What fuel is burning and where does it come from?
Substitute "sunburned's brain" for sun and the question makes more sense.
I don't know why it hasn't burned out yet?......or has it?
You are making fun of him because he listens to music that could have taught you the answer to the question you are asking.
You are dense.
srsly? wrote:
A few billion years later the sun's core will become completely helium and it will explode into a supernova.
Okay, I'll skip any other potential problems with your post--I wasn't an astrophysics major, either, so the corrections are a job for someone more knowledgeable than I--and simply address the misstatement about Sol's going supernova.
It may be the case that our star, Sol, will go nova. But a supernova is something else. It's rare (hence the "super-") and not, as near as we know, a possible outcome for a rather ordinary star like ours. In particular, a supernova explosion requires, we think, a star roughly ten times as massive as our own; and there's no indication that Sol will acquire that kind of extra mass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova