Steve Dutch
Jul 22, 2017 · 1 min read

There’s more to it. If you try to create nuclei heavier than He4, you find that nuclei of mass 5 are so unstable they fly apart before anything else can happen. If you try to get around that by fusing two He4 nuclei, the resulting mass 8 nucleus is highly unstable — but- it can hold together long enough for a third nucleus to plow into it, jumping to C-12. And we’re off to the races.

If it were a tad easier to make heavy nuclei, we’d probably long since have run out of nuclear fuel, and if it were just a bit harder, we wouldn’t have heavy nuclei at all. I call the “Mass 5–8 Bottleneck” “Nature’s fuel regulator.” It makes a far more convincing argument for intelligent design than any of the crap put out by creationists.

A couple of other reasonably astonishing tidbits: the core of the Sun is millions of degrees but also has huge mass and volume. The energy density is roughly comparable to a candle flame and the energy production, by volume, is about comparable to the human body.

    Steve Dutch

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