Posted on 07/17/2002 11:33:32 PM PDT by per loin
Source: | University Of Missouri-Rolla (http://www.umr.edu) | ||
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Date: | Posted 7/17/2002 |
The Sun: A Great Ball Of Iron? For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper presented before the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at UMR, says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. Manuel claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface. But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova that continues to generate energy within the iron-rich interior of the sun, Manuel says. "We think that the solar system came from a single star, and the sun formed on a collapsed supernova core," Manuel says. "The inner planets are made mostly of matter produced in the inner part of that star, and the outer planets of material form the outer layers of that star."
Manuel's theory that the solar system was born catastrophically out of a supernova goes against the widely-held belief among astrophysicists that the sun and planets were formed 4.5 billion years ago in a relatively ambiguous cloud of interstellar dust. Iron and the heavy element known as xenon are at the center of Manuel's efforts to change the way people think about the solar system's origins. Born of a supernova Manuel believes a supernova rocked our area of the Milky Way galaxy some five billion years ago, giving birth to all the heavenly bodies that populate the solar system. Analyses of meteorites reveal that all primordial helium is accompanied by "strange xenon," he says, adding that both helium and strange xenon came from the outer layer of the supernova that created the solar system. Helium and strange xenon are also seen together in Jupiter. Manuel has spent the better part of his 40-year scientific career trying to convince others of his hypothesis. Back in 1975, Manuel and another UMR researcher, Dr. Dwarka Das Sabu, first proposed that the solar system formed from the debris of a spinning star that exploded as a supernova. They based their claim on studies of meteorites and moon samples which showed traces of strange xenon. Data from NASA's Galileo probe of Jupiter's helium-rich atmosphere in 1996 reveals traces of strange xenon gases -- solid evidence against the conventional model of the solar system's creation, Manuel says. Editor's Note: The original news release can be found at http://web.umr.edu/~newsinfo/ironsun.html
The Sun is hot,
the Sun is not
a place where we could live.
But here on Earth
there'd be no life
without the light it gives.
We need its light.
We need its heat.
The sunlight that we see,
the sunlight comes from our own Sun's atomic energy. The Sun is hot...
The Sun is so hot that everything on it is a gas--
aluminum, copper, iron, and many others.
The Sun is large...
If the Sun were hollow, a million Earths would fit inside.
And yet, it is only a middle-size star.
The Sun is far away--
about 93 million miles away, and that's why it looks so small.
For even when it's out of sight,
the Sun shines night and day.
Scientists have found that the Sun is a huge atom-smashing machine.
The heat and light of the Sun are caused by nuclear reactions between
hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and helium.
The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas,
a gigantic nuclear furnace.
Where hydrogen is built into helium
at a temperature of millions of degrees.
Oh, for Pete's sake, not the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix again. Always with the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix...are you referring to the 3x3 unitary matrix V operating on the charge -e/3 quark mass eigenstates (d, s, and b), that Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix?
I have no idea what any of this means but it sounds like some serious sh*t...
From that site you attempted to link:
Says SNO Project Director Art McDonald of Queen's University, "These new results show in a clear, simple and accurate way that solar neutrinos change their type. The total number of neutrinos we observe is also in excellent agreement with calculations of the nuclear reactions powering the Sun. The SNO team is really excited because these measurements enable neutrino properties such as mass to be specified with much greater certainty for fundamental theories of elementary particles."
Aye, the same. And et'll swink on muckle a u, c, and t quark as weel, to spite ye.
See, now Axenolith's got me talking in Brogue...
They were ordered online from neutrinos.com. There's free shipping if you order more than 1030.
This really irritates me. Now, when I get home with the wrong flavor of neutrino, I can no longer blame the store for selling me the wrong neutrinos. Sigh.
I have to brush up on my particle physics... There has been some important work done lately and I'm not keeping track of it. 'Course, it's difficult enough to keep track of work in my sub-field, let alone a totally unrelated but way cool field...
I'm partial to particles.com. They have a wider selection and better customer service than molecules.com. The down side is that they package by the 6.022 x 1023, and there's a big charge for breaking packages. No, I don't have any stock in particles.com. ;-)
Mike
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