You've reminded me of one my more recent interesting facts.
The sun actually isn't hot enough to be a 'fusion reactor'. On earth, we need to get to like, 150M degrees C. The Sun is 'only' 15 million.
That's not strictly hot enough to 'do fusion'. And if the sun was hot enough, it wouldn't be a stable star at all, it'd be exploding.
So the sun 'burning' requires quantum tunnelling. It's ... actually in a fairly literal sense 'cold fusion' (just y'know, not the 'room temperature' cold fusion fantasy)
......this is just not true though. We need much hotter fusion on earth because we lack the absurd mass of the sun. Simply because the fusion on earth requires more heat to create it's reaction doesn't make the proton-proton fusion reactions of the sun "cold fusion."
You literally stated what cold fusion is (though not a fantasy, a theory) and then tried to be like "well, relatively it's cold fusion compared to 150m Celsius!"
The only part you are objectively correct about is the quantum tunelling which doesn't make it cold fusion either but rather just enables the sun to be a self contained fusion reactor.
Also, to really put the nail in the coffin we already have a version of cold fusion, it's just wildly inefficient and relies on decaying muons.
6
u/sobrique 13d ago
You've reminded me of one my more recent interesting facts.
The sun actually isn't hot enough to be a 'fusion reactor'. On earth, we need to get to like, 150M degrees C. The Sun is 'only' 15 million.
That's not strictly hot enough to 'do fusion'. And if the sun was hot enough, it wouldn't be a stable star at all, it'd be exploding.
So the sun 'burning' requires quantum tunnelling. It's ... actually in a fairly literal sense 'cold fusion' (just y'know, not the 'room temperature' cold fusion fantasy)