12 Responses

1. Good question… That’s gonna be stuck in my head now lol

2. Next time you want to troll, remember to set your activity to private

   http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Amyg70JY5vFHJL0T5VH6Am4gBgx.;_ylv=3?qid=20130114110200AAW11GY

3. the sun does not burn like paper or fire logs..it glows because it is a very big ball of gas and a process called nuclear fushion.

4. The sun’s not on fire, not in the conventional sense. It’s fusing hydrogen in the core. It’s similar to fire, but on a nuclear instead of a chemical level. It doesn’t require oxygen.

5. The sun is not “on fire” – at it’s core is a nuclear reaction that occurs releasing massive amounts of heat and energy. The plasma (one of the four states of matter) that surrounds the sun glows white hot but it does not burn.

6. The sun is NOT on fire. Fire as you know it is a Chemical process requiring Heat, Fuel, and Oxygen.

   The Sun is composed mostly of Hydrogen Gas which is undergoing NUCLEAR FUSION.

   Nuclear Fusion only requires HEAT and Fuel. The Fuel is Hydrogen and the Heat is provided by Gravity.

7. ‘Fire’ is just how energy being released looks. In a campfire atoms (oxygen and carbon) are bond creating CO2, releasing energy in the process which you see (and feel) as fire. The sun fuses hydrogen to helium, a process far more energy efficient than atomic re-bonding. The released energy by that process appears as ‘fire’. But the more correct term would be plasma.

8. The sun isn’t burning, fusion processes are taking place.

9. The sun doesn’t burn like a log in your fireplace. That’s actually a chemical reaction – the logs are burning
   by the oxygen in the air – in effect, turning the log into ash and lots of CO2.

   The sun burns by *nuclear fusion* – four hydrogen atoms are being fused into a single helium atom, billions of times each second, under tremendous heat and pressure.

   Y’know the bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II? Those were *fission* bombs – the breaking apart of very heavy nuclei (Uranium and Plutonium, respectively). When they exploded, they were very powerful, and devastated buildings within about 2 miles of ground zero.

   Now… ever see the bombs being tested at Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific? Those were *fusion* bombs – using the same method the sun does – to join hydrogen atoms into helium atoms – and releasing vast amounts of energy in the process. These tests left mile-wide craters in the sea floor, and erased a couple of small islands – they were much more powerful than the bombs we dropped on Japan. And, it’s this power that keeps the sun burning so bright, and for so long.

10. Nuclear fusion

11. The Sun is a ball of plasma with nuclear fusion going on ti’s core. Fire is a chemical reaction. Nuclear fusion is NOT fire.

    This is how the Sun fuses four protons to gether to make one helium atom. NO OXYGEN is required

    http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/proton-proton_chain.html

12. The Sun is a so called black body. It looks essentially white because it is literally white hot, as all black bodies look when they are as hot as the Sun’s outer layers are, which is ~5,700 degrees Kelvin. If you could heat a black Iron cannonball up to the same white hot surface temperature, it would look the same.
    What makes it so hot is that the Sun continually converts matter into energy by fusing Hydrogen nuclei (protons) into Helium nuclei (alpha particles), and the resultant energy released from the matter destroyed comes out as pure heat which then radiates away into empty space. This process is sufficient to keep the Sun’s surface white hot for billions of years.