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Once the Sun changes from burning hydrogen within its core to burning hydrogen in a shell around its core, the core will start to contract, and the outer envelope will expand. The total luminosity will steadily increase over the following billion years until it reaches 2,730 times its current luminosity at the age of 12.167 billion years.
The hydrogen and most of the helium in the Sun would have been produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis in the first 20 minutes of the universe, and the heavier elements were produced by previous generations of stars before the Sun was formed, and spread into the interstellar medium during the final stages of stellar life and by events such as ...
The faint young Sun paradox or faint young Sun problem describes the apparent contradiction between observations of liquid water early in Earth's history and the astrophysical expectation that the Sun's output would have been only 70 percent as intense during that epoch as it is during the modern epoch. [1]
Atmospheric escape of hydrogen on Earth is due to charge exchange escape (~60–90%), Jeans escape (~10–40%), and polar wind escape (~10–15%), currently losing about 3 kg/s of hydrogen. [1] The Earth additionally loses approximately 50 g/s of helium primarily through polar wind escape. Escape of other atmospheric constituents is much ...
In reality, the lifespan of a star is greater than what is estimated by the thermal time scale because as one fuel becomes scarce, another will generally take its place – hydrogen burning gives way to helium burning, which is replaced by carbon burning.
A plasma enters what scientists call the burning plasma regime when the self-heating power exceeds any external heating. [1] The Sun is a burning plasma that has reached fusion ignition, meaning the Sun's plasma temperature is maintained solely by energy released from fusion. The Sun has been burning hydrogen for 4.5 billion years and is about ...
The core contains 34% of the Sun's mass, but only 3% of the Sun's volume, and it generates 99% of the fusion power of the Sun. There are two distinct reactions in which four hydrogen nuclei may eventually result in one helium nucleus: the proton–proton chain reaction – which is responsible for most of the Sun's released energy – and the ...
The solar wind consists of particles (ionized atoms from the solar corona) and fields like the magnetic field that are produced from the Sun and stream out into space. Because the Sun rotates once approximately every 25 days, the heliospheric magnetic field [ 11 ] transported by the solar wind gets wrapped into a spiral.