The fresh fields of hydrogen
Episode 50 · Audio file · August 11th, 2017 · 1 hr 1 min
What is the Sun?
- Powers of Ten™: The famous video from 1977 that explains the scale of the universe (YouTube)
- The Sun (Wikipedia)
- Formation of the Sun (Wikipedia)
- The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old: Facts about the Sun’s age, size & history (Space.com)
- How is a star born? (Scientific American)
- How does a star ignite? (Physics Stack Exchange)
- Cosmic dust (Wikipedia)
- All you need is cold gas: The legacy of K. E. Edgeworth (NED)
- Stars form out in the cold & fuel the growth of supermassive black holes (SMH)
- Newton's laws (Hyperphysics)
- Animation of Jupiter seen in the infrared (NASA/JPL Caltech)
- What is fusion (livescience)
- Nuclear fusion (Hyperphysics)
- Nuclear fusion in stars (Wikipedia)
- After 60 years, is nuclear fusion finally poised to deliver? (The Guardian)
- Chain reaction (Wikipedia)
- Diana Ross: Chain Reaction (YouTube)
- The Sun's structure & energy production (Wikipedia)
- National Ignition Facility recreates the interior of heavy stars (ars Technica)
- Naming conventions for our Sun or 'Sol' (Wikipedia)
- Parker Solar Probe: Humanity’s first visit to a star (NASA)
- Sunshine (IMDb)
- It sounds like stars do all seem to start with hydrogen: Star formation (Wikipedia)
- Stars (NASA)
- Main sequence stars (CSIRO)
- Post-main sequence stars (CSIRO)
- There is a minimum mass for stars: ~8% of the mass of the Sun, lower than that & the internal pressure from gravity is too low to trigger the necessary nuclear reactions (NASA)
- The Sun consumes about 600 million tonnes of hydrogen per second (NASA)
- The future of the Sun: After core hydrogen exhaustion (Wikipedia)
- Helium 'burning' & the helium flash: In post-main sequence stars, helium nuclei fuse to eventually form carbon-12 (CSIRO)
- Modelling a star on a computer (Western Michigan University)
- The CNO cycle (Cosmos)
- Will the sun go supernova in six years & destroy Earth? (Ask an Astronomer)
- Iron & nickel are the heaviest elements that can be made in stars like our Sun that don't undergo supernova explosions (NASA)
- Red giant stars (Cosmos)
- Cold dead star may be a giant diamond (Space.com)
- Measuring a white dwarf star (NASA)
- The electromagnetic spectrum (NASA)
- What is Earth's magnetic field? (Universe Today)
- The 11-year cycle of solar minimums & maximums (NASA)
- The sun is so hot it's mostly made of plasma (NASA)
- Convection zone (Wikipedia)
- Structure of stars showing convection zones (ESO)
- Understanding the magnetic sun (NASA)
- The singing sun: Listen to the sound the sun makes! (Stanford Solar Center)
- The corona of the Sun, it's outer atmosphere (NASA)
- Why is the Sun's corona the hottest layer when it's farther from the core than other layers? (Scientific American)
- What are sun spots? (Wikipedia)
- Coronal mass ejection (Wikipedia)
- What is solar wind? (QRG, Northwestern University)
- No more solar wind for Voyager 1 spacecraft (Phys.org)
- The Voyagers have reached an anniversary worth celebrating (ars Technica)
- What is an aurora? (NASA)
- Solar storm & space weather FAQ (NASA)
- Can solar flares hurt astronauts? (Universe Today)
- Fast & slow solar wind (Wikipedia)
- The Carrington Event of 1859 (Wikipedia)
- How are the astronauts in the ISS protected from solar flares? (Space Exploration, Stack Exchange)
- Who's afraid of a solar flare? (NASA)
- What if the biggest solar storm on record happened today? (National Geographic)
- Did a massive solar proton event fry the Earth? (Space Daily)
- 1 in 8 chance of catastrophic solar megastorm by 2020 (Wired)
Corrections
- The sun will eventually become a red giant (not a red dwarf) & then a white dwarf (Space.com)
- It sounds like Saturn, not Jupiter, emits infrared radiation from frictional heating - Jupiter's 'glow' is thought to be from cooling left over from its formation (LibreTexts Physics)
- Apparently the sun is only half way through its main sequence lifecycle (Wikipedia)
- The sun won’t die for 5 billion years (The Conversation)
- Estimates vary, but it's agreed it takes a LONG time for a photon to escape the sun (Futurism)
- Why does it take thousands of years for light to escape the Sun? (Ask a Mathematician/Physicist)