George Stuart Goodman, Jr., age 11, of Richmond, Va., for his question:
Will our sun ever burn out?
A worrywart can always find a good excuse to do soma worrying. But we have no reason to pick on our big old friendly sun. He is our very own glorious star. He has been blazing away for billions, yes, billions of years and he will continue to pour forth light and warmth for billions of years to come. So, you see, them is no reason to worry the sun failing soon.
We tend to think of the sun as a bier fire, and so it is ‑ but not the kind of fire that burns in a grate. If the sun were made of top grade coal, it would burn to cold ashes in about 5,000 years. But the monstrous furnace does not burn coal. Its radiant energy comes from atomic power. The energy of the hydrogen bomb is vary like the energy of the sun. However, our biggest H‑bomb is less than a flea. bite to that enormous furnace smiling, down on us from the sky.
This type of atomic energy is called nuclear fusion ‑ the opposite of nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is atom smashing ‑ the breaking of the atomic nucleus into smaller particles. Atomic fusion is the joining of several atoms into a larger atom. The word fissure means a crack or split. The word fusion means to join or weld. The suns energy comes from atomic fusion, the welding of smaller atoms into larger atoms.
We believe that our starry sun is busy making hydrogen gas into helium gas. The hydrogen atom is the smallest of all atoms. The helium atom weighs almost four times as much as a hydrogen atom. In the sums atomic furnace, we believe, four hydrogen atoms fuse to form one helium atom. There is a fragment left over from the operation. And that fragment is released as energy. Multiplied countless times, this is the radiant energy poured from the sun.
Energy can be estimated in ounces, pounds and tons. If a 60‑watt light bulb could burn steadily for three million years, it would give off one and a half ounces of energy. Our big old sun radiates over one million million tons of energy every month of his life, and the great atomic furnace blazes day and night. The radiant energy pours forth in all directions.
Only about two‑billionths of this energy falls upon our planet. But it is enough to turn our world into a luxurious place of lush vegetation teeming with life.
The sun's atomic furnace does not burn oxygen. But supplies of hydrogen are being turned into helium. This happens on a large scale. Every second four million tons of the Bunts hydrogen fuel is turned into energy and radiated forth across space. Will this fuel every run out? We do not know for sure. But we do know that our bright star has enough hydrogen fuel on hand to last another 10 or 12 billion years or so.
The human family has been on earth a million years or so. We have already made our own satellites, plans are underway to go to the moon and the planets. Suppose in the year two billion two thousand the sun seemed to be dying down. You can bet your boots the human family could pack up and find a new home near a younger sun in the starry sky, what an adventure that would be.