Thunderbolts asks: What is the power source driving the sun?

[Suchender]

Jan 06, 2006
Projecting Nuclear Fusion onto the Sun

What is the source of the Sun’s light and heat? Throughout history people have proposed answers to this question that have always reflected human experience. The Sun was a shining god or a “spark” cast off in the creation. Later it was a pile of burning sticks or coal.
By the nineteenth century, astronomers had become accustomed to thinking that gravity was the dominant force in the heavens. So they began to conjecture that the energy of the Sun might be due to “gravitational collapse”, a compression of solar gases by gravity. This simple hypothesis, its proponents claimed, could provide the required energy output for a few tens of millions of years........ Then, in 1920, the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington combined the principle of gravitational collapse with an exciting new principle in the physical sciences - nuclear fusion. He proposed that at the core of the Sun, pressures and temperatures induced a nuclear reaction fusing hydrogen into helium.

In the early formulations of the “standard model” of star formation, it was said that the gravitational force within a primordial cloud leads to its progressive compression into a “circumstellar disk”..... In stars ... with envisioned core temperatures less than 15 million Kelvin, the nuclear reaction begins when hydrogen protons are joined or stuck together in the “proton-proton fusion” of hydrogen into helium.
Critics, however, pointed out that the temperatures given by standard gas laws are not sufficient to provoke nuclear fusion..... To achieve fusion, it would be necessary for protons to cross the barrier of the repulsive electric force, which is sufficient to keep the protons apart forever. But Eddington’s successors accomplished the impossible by something called quantum tunneling, enabling an extremely small percentage of protons to simply “appear” inside the barrier at any particular time.

This was long before arrival of the space age with its discovery that the charged particles of plasma permeate interplanetary and interstellar space, and long before any systematic investigations of plasma and electricity in space.

Advocates of the “nuclear furnace” made a series of fundamental assumptions common to astronomy long before the emergence of a nuclear model of the Sun. The credibility of these assumptions was not an issue to them. They assumed that diffuse clouds of gas in space would collapse gravitationally into star-sized bodies. They assumed that the Sun’s mass could be calculated simply from the orbital motions of the planets. They assumed that Newtonian calculations of mass, coupled with standard gas laws, enabled them to determine the pressure and temperature of the Sun’s core.
The pioneers of the nuclear furnace also followed another assumption common to astronomy in their time - that the Sun and planets are electrically neutral. They gave no consideration to the role of electricity and no consideration to the role of the magnetic fields that electric currents generate............

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Mel Acheson, Michael Armstrong, Dwardu Cardona,
Ev Cochrane, C.J. Ransom, Don Scott, Rens van der Sluijs, Ian Tresman
EXECUTIVE EDITORS: David Talbott, Wallace Thornhill
https://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060106fusion.htm

The image of the sun above was recorded in the light given off by iron atoms that have lost 11 of their 26 electrons. The energy required to remove that many electrons is far greater than the energy available at the surface of the sun. These iron ions occur high in the sun's atmosphere--in the corona--where the effective temperature is 2 million degrees or more, 400 times that of the photosphere.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Eddington’s successors accomplished the impossible by something called quantum tunneling, enabling an extremely small percentage of protons to simply “appear” inside the barrier at any particular time.

Quantum tunneling is a real thing, which is also responsible for functioning of transistors & photocells. There are lots of experimental reports of fusion in a diverse variety of conditions, including "Farnsworth fusors" that can be built by high school students. None of it would work without quantum tunneling. So I'm not sure I understand why the "appearance" of protons crossing the energy barrier to achieve fusion, is viewed in this article as a magic trick set apart by scare quotes. And accordingly, I don't see any reason to doubt that fusion reactions inside the sun are also a real thing.

Having said that, I'm sure that electric effects are also important to solar phenomenon, and even that they've been underrated in classical astrophysics. Even the Wikipedia article about the sun admits that there is no commonly accepted & adequate explanation for the high temperature of the solar corona.

Advocates of the “nuclear furnace” made a series of fundamental assumptions common to astronomy long before the emergence of a nuclear model of the Sun. The credibility of these assumptions was not an issue to them. They assumed that diffuse clouds of gas in space would collapse gravitationally into star-sized bodies. They assumed that the Sun’s mass could be calculated simply from the orbital motions of the planets. They assumed that Newtonian calculations of mass, coupled with standard gas laws, enabled them to determine the pressure and temperature of the Sun’s core.

So have the "Thunderbolts" folks re-done these calculations based on their new models? What are the new results?

 

[Richard Stanley]

What is the source of the Sun’s light and heat? Throughout history people have proposed answers to this question that have always reflected human experience. The Sun was a shining god or a “spark” cast off in the creation. Later it was a pile of burning sticks or coal.

Other than that the mention of the "pile of burning sticks or coal" forms a nice segue from the transformation of CO2 to a discussion of the nature of the Sun, I'm not sure what relevance this post is to the thread topic, albeit interesting.

In any case, since all the various elements are supposedly 'fused' inside their mother stars, I've long been curious as the role of such heavy fissile materials in both our Sun and at the core of Earth, in contrast to the (Earth's) iron core theory. Heavy elements should descend to the Earth's core before lighter ones such as iron, while being progressively 'fused' in the Sun's.

But now that the Sun and hydrogen have been brought into the discussion I will 'merely' add that ammonia, NH3, was named for the Egyptian solar god, Amun, whom Christians unwittingly say Amen to.

Ammonia is named for the Ammonians, worshipers of the Egyptian god Amun, who used ammonium chloride in their rituals.[10]​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia​

Some Canadian is proposing to use ammonia as an alternative fuel, and energy storage 'battery' to fossil fuels and to hydrogen. Ammonia is much more energy dense than hydrogen, but must be handled carefully due to its volatility. If burned properly it produces pure nitrogen (most of our atmosphere) and water.

So Amun might be able to save us after all.

 

[Suchender]

Other than that the mention of the "pile of burning sticks or coal" forms a nice segue from the transformation of CO2 to a discussion of the nature of the Sun, I'm not sure what relevance this post is to the thread topic

The topic made me remember the Sun (son) !

 

[Suchender]

I don't see any reason to doubt that fusion reactions inside the sun are also a real thing.

Fusion Confusion
Feb 25, 2019

............One of the Sun’s greater mysteries is why temperatures rise to approximately 20,000 Celsius at the top of the chromosphere. However, the greatest mystery of all (from a consensus viewpoint) is why the corona can be as much as two million Celsius! Why does the hottest region of the Sun begin at an altitude of 4000 kilometers, extending over a million kilometers from its surface, without any significant temperature drop? Since the problems with magnetic reconnection theory are detailed many times in previous Picture of the Day articles, they will not be explained here...........

Electric Universe advocate Wal Thornhill wrote:
“The chromosphere has a strong electric field which flattens out but remains non-zero throughout the solar system. As protons accelerate down the chromospheric slope…they encounter turbulence…which heats the solar corona to millions of degrees. The small, but relatively constant, accelerating voltage gradient beyond the corona is responsible for accelerating the solar wind away from the Sun.”

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2019/02/25/fusion-confusion/

 

[Suchender]

Quantum tunneling is a real thing...
So have the "Thunderbolts" folks re-done these calculations based on their new models? What are the new results?

 

[Jerry Russell]

I'm not sure what relevance this post is to the thread topic, albeit interesting.

Since it seems to have become an ongoing discussion, I'm moving it to its own thread.

However, the greatest mystery of all (from a consensus viewpoint) is why the corona can be as much as two million Celsius!

So even supposing Thornhill's explanation is correct, it doesn't explain where the sun's energy output comes from. The conventional model (if I understand correctly) is that energy from the nuclear reaction at the core, is transmitted via thermal radiation to the photosphere, a dense gaseous layer which radiates at a black body temperature of 5777 K. So it's not nearly as hot as the corona, but far more dense, and thus radiates much more energy than the corona.

I don't see how Thornhill's model can explain how the relatively small amounts of energy in the corona, can create or cause the much greater energy flux emitting from the photosphere.

Quantum craziness

It's true that modern physics has become very mathematical. But time and time again, physicists have made abstract mathematical predictions that have turned out to be experimentally verifiable. So if there's a mathematical analysis that says there's a wormhole connection between entangled particles or systems, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone if this turns out to be true as well.

Wormhole tunnels between entangled particles at great distances, aren't the same thing as quantum tunnels that enable reactions between protons at sub-molecular distances of separation.

As I mentioned earlier, we know that nuclear fusion takes place, even in small, simple reactors built by high school students. Given hydrogen reactants, the simple signature products of the reaction are neutrons and helium. If the "Thunderbolts" people are going to deny the existence of quantum tunneling of protons across an electrical energy barrier, they have to explain how else this desktop reaction works. It's a completely independent question from whether the conditions for fusion exist at the core of the sun.