The Sun Isn’t Hot Enough to Shine
Nuclear fusion requires 100 million degrees Kelvin, yet the Sun’s core can only reach 15 million. How then does it create light? A quantum phenomena known as quantum tunneling is the answer.
Students are taught that a star has enough gravity from its immense size to create high enough pressure and temperature to overcome the natural repulsion of protons in hydrogen atoms and fuse them into helium. The helium weighs slightly less than the original hydrogen atoms, and the missing mass is released as an enormous amount of energy, as dictated by Einstein’s E=mc^2. According to this equation, even a tiny amount of mass (m) becomes a lot of energy (E) when multiplied by the speed of light squared (c^2), which is roughly 9 x 10 16m^2/s^2.
While this sounds like a solid explanation, there’s a massive problem: the Sun’s core doesn’t get anywhere near hot enough for nuclear fusion to occur. Here on Earth, our fusion reactors, which may actually power the grid soon, need much higher…
