Astronomy 1021 Lecture : The Sun
17 Jan 2012
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Document Summary
The sun s total power output is called luminosity and it is huge at about 3. 8 x 1026watts. In perspective if we could somehow capture and store 1 second s worth of the sun s luminosity, it would be enough to meet current human energy demands for roughly the next 500,000 years. For a long time the source of the sun s energy remained a complete mystery. The first guess was that it was a chemical reaction but a fire on something that big would not last very long and there is no oxygen to fuel it in space. With his e=mc2 formula in 1905 there was some outlook. Energy has mass and lots of it and there is plenty stored in atoms (if you could convert 1kg of matter completely into energy in about a second you would generate 100, 000 trillion watts of energy) 1 helium nucleus is lighter than 4 hydrogens.
