Jump to content
Science Forums

Recommended Posts

Posted

Question posed: What is the connection between the question in the thread title and the question in the OP?

 

Question posed: Who in their right minds uses the word "sun" instead of "star" (unless they are French)?

Posted (edited)

No idea - OceanBreeze might know. It's hard to believe that English is the OP's first language.

Maybe an unkind (sub-Johnsonian) reference to the tendency of the French towards striking absurd intellectual poses. :)

Edited by exchemist
Posted

Question Posed: What if every Black Hole is just a Portal that connects to a sun?

If for every star, there must be a black hole, we’d need a lot more black holes than are thought to exist.

 

Because the only known way black holes are formed is by the collapse of large stars, and because only about 1 in every 1,000 stars is massive enough to form a black hole at the end of the shiny phase of its life, there are about 1,000 times more stars than black holes. (source: HubbleSite.org’s “how many black holes are there?”)

 

I have childhood memories of astronomers speculating in the late 1960s through mid 1970s that blackholes were connected via wormholes to “white holes” as an explanation quasars, which at the time were so luminous they defied more prosaic explanation. This seems sort of a scaled-up version of your speculation, Claude.

 

By the late 1970s, though, as astronomers found and studied more black holes, and over the next decades, as the consensus emerged that practically all galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers, that the huge accretion disks around the SMBH can become very luminous, and thus that a quasar is just a galaxy with its SMBH in such a state – an active galactic nucleus – this idea was abandoned so thoroughly that few people even remember it. More on it can be found at this Wikipedia section, and in popular astronomy books from those days.

 

As for the title, a sun (or, as most people call them, a star) is a ball of light elements massive enough to sustain fusion. Nothing like those old proposals for the source of energy for a quasar is needed to explain them, just good old-fashioned nuclear chemistry. :)

Posted (edited)

Except for the fact the all attempts to replicate the nuclear fusion model of the sun for use as an energy source have failed. It's never been shown, even in principle that nuclear fusion is capable of releasing enough sustained energy to not only hold up a star against its own gravity but also have enough left over to release all the radiation that they do.

 

Edit:

So far every attempt has required more energy to produce the fusion that the fusion itself is able to release.

 

I should really try again to get some sleep.

Edited by A-wal
Posted (edited)

Holy **** this is crap, A-wal.  I didn't realize in my previous absentminded attention to this forum how ludicrous your assertions are.  Here, you are, with what I must assume is a straight face, claiming that because we can not easily accomplish nuclear fusion on the surface of the Earth, nuclear fusion in the middle of the Sun is also difficult.  "So far every attempt has required more energy to produce the fusion that the fusion itself is able to release."  This is an excellent description of fusion on the surface of the Earth.  Because the Sun is demonstrably more massive than the Earth, and because fusion becomes easier as gravity increases, your realization that continued fusion on the surface of the Earth has not yet been realized has absolutely no bearing on the core of our sun.

 

You made a claim, "Except for the fact the all attempts to replicate the nuclear fusion model of the sun for use as an energy source have failed. It's never been shown, even in principle that nuclear fusion is capable of releasing enough sustained energy to not only hold up a star against its own gravity but also have enough left over to release all the radiation that they do."

 

What evidence do you have to support your claim?

 

Edit:  Let's break it down for simpicity's sake.  You made a number of unsupported claims.  1)all attempts to replicate the nuclear fusion model of the sun for use as an energy source have failed. 2)It's never been shown, even in principle that nuclear fusion is capable of releasing enough sustained energy to not only hold up a star against its own gravity but also have enough left over to release all the radiation that they do.

 

I know neither of these claims to be accurate.  You claim that they are.  What is your evidence?

Edited by JMJones0424
Posted

It's never been shown, even in principle that nuclear fusion is capable of releasing enough sustained energy to not only hold up a star against its own gravity but also have enough left over to release all the radiation that they do.

I’m fairly sure you’re mistaken about this, A-wal. See if you can find a source to back it up.

 

JMJones asks the same thing, less gently. ;)

 

Though models of the complicated details of how the fusion energy in their cores gets to their surfaces, and how stars’ size and mass vary as they age, especially during interesting explode-y and semi-explode-y phases continue to be evolve, the basics of how that energy is produces, and the balance of it vs self-gravity that determines stars’ rough densities has been well-understood since the late 1950s. See the Wikipedia articles Nuclear fusion, Stellar nucleosynthesis, and Convection zone for more.

 

I think the biggest theoretical puzzle of stellar fusion was the solar neutrino problem, where the number of neutrinos observed emitted by the Sun was almost exactly 1/3rd the amount predicted by the theoretical models. This discrepancy led not to changes in theories of nuclear fusion, but in the nature of neutrinos, specifically support for the theory of neutrino oscillation, where a flavor of a neutrino changes between 3 kinds, so that 2/3rds of the electron neutrinos emitted by solar fusion are on of the other 2 flavors – muon or tau – when they reach detectors on Earth.

 

Accept for the fact the all attempts to replicate the nuclear fusion model of the sun for use as an energy source have failed.

...

Edit:

So far every attempt has required more energy to produce the fusion that the fusion itself is able to release.

The trouble with fusion power is not that we can’t artificially produce in a small device more energy than used for a short period – fusion bombs to that quite well – or that long, even power output is impossible in a very large “device” – nature does this very well with stars – but that we can’t make a small device with long, even power output.

 

I should really try again to get some sleep.

Me too. My work for the past few weeks has me up morning and late nights, napping during the day, and other weirdness that confusing my circadian rhythms no end. Right now, I need to try to stay up for a few hours so I can work from 9:00 PM to 4:00 AM tomorrow, then go to a big, social meeting 5 hrs later. How to do this without being weirdly giddy in public is challenging. :)
Posted (edited)

Haha.  It's funny when JMJones asks you to provide evidence for your idiotic claims, A-wal, because JMJones is not "gentle".  I would not need to be concerned about the gentleness of my requests if you were more concerned about the evidence for your claims.

Edited by JMJones0424

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...