A: How does the sun generate its energy?
*Credit: NASA
The Sun source of energy comes from the nuclear fusion that originates from the massive inward pressure caused by gravitational force.
The Sun was formed around 4.6 billion years ago when a giant molecular cloud of hydrogen and helium collapsed under the effect of gravitational forces caused by its own mass.
This sudden collapse may have been caused by the shockwave of a nearby supernova explosion.
When this happened the cloud material accumulated faster and faster into an ever smaller region of space while internal pressure kept on rising due to the continuous addition of gas "falling" towards the same central point.
This increasing pressure caused the center of the cloud to continuously become hotter.
Eventually the repulsive forces keeping protons (the constituent of hydrogen) distant from each other are overwhelmed by the inward pressure, forcing two hydrogen atoms to fuse together and generate an atom of deuterium and the ejection of a neutrino and a positron, in what is known as nuclear fusion.
The chain reaction follows with deuterium and hydrogen atoms also fusing together, producing helium-3 and a burst of gamma ray.
Finally, helium-3 atoms fuse together into a helium-4 atom and the ejection of two hydrogen atoms.
The source of energy produced by this type of nuclear fusion comes from the fact that some of the mass of the original constituents is converted into energy, following the E=mc2 energy/matter equivalence principle.
*Credit: bob on Wikipedia
The immense pressure of the sun and the nuclear fusion that ensues causes the inner core of the Sun to reach a temperature of over 15 million degrees, the the "surface" of the Sun cools down to a more 'reasonable' temperature of around 5,500 degrees.
At the current rate the Sun will keep on burning its hydrogen fuel for another 5 billion years, before becoming a red giant.
References
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Well it should be noted that Sun and sunlike stars have both P-P chain fusion and CNO cycle fusion. :)
In the following post I will explain it thoroughly. I will try to be more active on stemQ as well. :)
Great, I look forward to seeing an additional answer to this question.
Thanks! :-)
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