What does the sun use as fuel, why hasn't it burned out in 4.6 billion years? How long can it still burn?

When it comes to the sun, everyone knows that it is the source of life. It is it that selflessly "burns" itself and emits light and heat, which nurtures billions of lives. But when it comes to the sun and how it "burns", I am afraid that most people can only say "nuclear fusion" based on their impressions, so I don't know if you have ever thought about why the hydrogen bomb explosion that also uses nuclear fusion can only be maintained. In just a few seconds, but the sun can "burn" for tens of billions of years?

Although the sun uses nuclear fusion technology like the hydrogen bomb, the level of technology contained in it can be said to be very different. Just inside the red sun above our heads, there is a secret that all scientists have been striving for, but it has always been difficult to reach. The Crown - Controlled Nuclear Fusion .

The so-called controllable nuclear fusion technology actually refers to making the energy released by nuclear fusion controllable and usable, rather than only causing blind damage. Once the research in this direction is successful, the 400,000 tons of deuterium contained in the earth's sea can be fully utilized, and this energy is enough for the current human beings to use for tens of billions of years.

Controllable nuclear fusion is still like a dream to human beings at present, and there is not only a single form of nuclear fusion. For example, the nuclear fusion inside the sun is a typical proton mass change . A simple overview is 4 separate hydrogen The atoms will fuse into a helium atom. This fusion is not violent, but it will also release a lot of energy, and when it accumulates, it will create the dazzling light of the sun.

Explaining why the sun "burns", I am afraid everyone still can't understand why the sun can burn steadily for tens of billions of years, and to find the answer to this question, we have to start from two aspects, one is " balance ", and the other is "balance". is the " reserve ".

First, let's talk about "balance".

What I want to popularize here is that although the sun appears to us as a reddish sphere, nuclear fusion is not taking place in all its locations, but only in its interior, which also leads to the Energy is radiated from the inside out and eventually spreads throughout the universe.

This kind of emission from the inside out has a certain similarity with the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, and it is also a release of energy. However, unlike the hydrogen bomb, the sun itself is a supermassive planet, and its interior has a great gravitational force. This gravitational force eventually restricts the energy that spreads out from the sun, and finally makes it in a certain part of the sun. A kind of "balance" is formed, which is the main reason why the sun does not burn out all at once, but can slowly glow and heat up for tens of billions of years.

Like the light we usually see and the feeling of geothermal heat, it actually comes from the energy generated by nuclear fusion inside the sun, but these energy eventually include many high-energy particle streams, wandering in the universe as "solar wind", and finally able to successfully reach Earth's, but only one in 2.2 billion , almost nothing. Only 1/10000 of this little energy can be used by human beings, but even this meager light and heat has benefited us a lot.

Second, let's take a look at "reserves".

As we said earlier, the mass of the sun is far from what the earth can match, and greater mass often means greater "reserves", such as the combination of hydrogen nuclei that occurs on the sun, is actually quite rare Yes, because the process is too difficult, but the mass of the sun is too large and the reserves of hydrogen nuclei are too large, which eventually makes the so-called "small probability event" a "common event".

You may not be able to understand it simply by describing it as an empty "big". Here we still use the earth as an example to make a comparison.

From the perspective of diameter, the sun is about 109 times the size of the earth. After converting to volume, the sun is about 1,295,029 earths . what is this concept? This means that the Earth is almost as tiny as a speck of dust in front of the sun.

But it is such a "dust". After the fusion of the deuterium contained in the inner ocean, the energy released is enough for human beings to use for tens of billions of years. From this, we can see what the energy contained in the sun is. How vast is that, and with such a vast amount of energy, is it any wonder that the sun "burns" for 10 billion years?

Having said that, it is quite difficult for the sun to react as violently and quickly as a hydrogen bomb. Because the conditions of the hydrogen bomb explosion are also quite harsh, in order to create its high temperature and high pressure conditions, people can only detonate the atomic bomb first to build its momentum. The sun is far from reaching, and because of this, the "burning" of the sun and the "explosion" of the hydrogen bomb can be described as different.

As far as the current situation is concerned, the sun has been burning for 4.6 billion years, and in the future it will still burn for 5 or 6 billion years. This time is nothing for the sun, and there may be many people who make the sun in the future. However, this time is too long for human beings, and it is unfounded for human beings to worry about the lifespan of the sun, because according to the calculations of scientists, if human beings cannot find a new way out, then they will not live in the sun at all. The day it goes out.

This is not to say that there are not enough resources on the earth, or the limitation of land space, but that as the sun continues to burn, its external radiation is also increasing, which means that the temperature of the earth's surface will slowly rise. high, eventually to an appalling level.

Take the moon as an example. The temperature on the side of the moon that is directly exposed to sunlight is as high as 100 degrees Celsius, while the temperature on the side away from the sun is minus 100 degrees Celsius. In this extremely harsh living environment, human beings cannot survive normally; The scary thing is that sooner or later the earth will become the next moon, which is why we say we have to "escape" the sun to find a new way out.

In any case, the burning of the sun will not be transferred by human will, and if we want to ensure the continuation of the population in the vast universe, we can only continue to explore and make breakthroughs, and finally find a way out in the sky above us. And the sun will continue to burn in this galaxy.