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The Secret Life of the Sun
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14435 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
2,905 Words |
| Author
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John Gribbin
John Gribbin is a science writer living in East Sussex,
England. His books include The Omega Point (Bantam), the story
of the search for the missing mass and the ultimate fate of
the universe. |
Our sun has been shining for at least four billion years. Geological evidence showing the great age of the sun emerged during the nineteenth century and provided scientists with ample food for thought. The evidence shows that the temperature on earth has been much the same for all that time, and so the sun must have been providing as much heat over all that time as it does today. Yet in the nineteenth century no known source of energy could keep the sun so hot for so long.
The situation changed in the twentieth century, when Albert Einstein's theory of relativity revealed that mass can be converted into energy. At first, nobody understood how mass might be converted into energy inside the sun and stars, but it was clear that this was the only possible source of the energy that could keep the sun hot. It was not until the late 1930s that theorists were able to calculate precisely how the sun works: by fusing nuclei of hydrogen into nuclei of helium and "losing" a little mass--converting it into energy--along the way.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the success of this theory was regarded as one of the great triumphs of science. It was calculated that the 600 million tons of hydrogen converted into helium in the heart of the sun every second involves the loss of four million tons of matter as pure energy. In line with Einstein's theory, just 7 percent of the "fuel" is turned into pure energy by this process of nuclear fusion.
It looked as if the innermost secret of the sun had been revealed. But then everything was thrown into confusion by the discovery that the sun does not, in fact, operate exactly as those treasured theories require. The latest revision of those theories suggests that the real secrets of the sun are intimately linked with the fate of the entire universe.
The Neutrino Gap
The dedication of one man set astronomers on the trail of this link between the sun and the cosmos. Ray Davis of the Brookhaven National Laboratory set out in the 1960s to detect streams of particles called neutrinos coming from the sun. To most of his colleagues, this seemed foolhardy. First of all, they "knew" how many neutrinos the sun was making from their standard theories of nuclear fusion. Secondly, neutrinos are almost impossible to detect.
According to those standard theories, just one step in the fusion processes going on inside the sun
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