How Powerful is the Sun?

How Powerful is the Sun?

PSun joules/sec= 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts

(= 400 Trillion, Trillion watts!) And this will continue for the Sun’s 10-Billion-Year Lifetime!

Q: What can the Sun do to us from 93,000,000 Miles away?

A: Quite a lot!

The “Solar Constant” 1400 Watts per Square Meter!

Q: What could the Sun’s Power Source be?A?:• Not Chemical Energy (i.e., “Oxidation/Combustion”… e.g., “Burning” wood, coal, etc…)

• Only one Power Source sufficient… => Nuclear Fusion!

• Not Gravitational Energy from “Kelvin-Helmholtz” Contraction…

Where Nuclear Energy actually comes from…

How to get energy from Nuclear processes…

Move towards a “more stable” (more strongly bound) nucleus!

(…what Fundamental Force of Physics could be Strong enough to hold Nuclei together against the Repulsion of “Like Charges”…?)

But a Nucleus is full of Positively-Charged Protons…

Yes, that’s right… It’s the “Strong Force”!

And YES, the particles carrying the Strong Force

are called “Gluons” (No joke!)

Fusion in the Core of the Sun: What it takes…

No“Cold Fusion”!

The key reaction of Solar Fusion:

The “Proton-Proton Chain”

The 1st Step:

All the Steps…

(…but what are these “ingredients”?)

Q1: What is “Antimatter”?

Q2: What happens when “Matter” & “Antimatter” meet?

(Diagram below shows the Opposite Process from the one above – Neutron Decay

into a Proton, Electron, & Anti-Neutrino – caused by the Weak Force)

The Particles that make up our Universe… The “Standard Model of Particle Physics”

The most elusive sub-atomic particle…the Neutrino…

Neutrinos DON’T “feel” the Strong (Nuclear Binding) or Electromagnetic (Charge) Forces!

They just feel the Weak (Radioactive Decay) Force! (…& a tiny bit of Gravity!)

Why Care about Neutrinos…? They helped Shape the Universe that we live in!

And the tremendous penetrating power of Neutrinos helps us Study the Universe, today!

Map of Large-Scale Structure of Galaxies:(Effects of Neutrinos:)

• The Big Bang! (the “Cosmic Neutrino Background”)

• The Sun (produced by nuclear fusion reactions)

• The Earth's atmosphere (produced by cosmic rays)

• Supernovae within our galaxy (produced by scattering reactions)

• The Earth's crust (produced by uranium and thorium decays)

• Cosmic accelerators (produced by pion and kaon decays)

• Nuclear power plants (produced by nuclear fission reactions)

• Neutrino superbeams (produced by pion and kaon decays)

• Neutrino factories (produced by muon decays)

Where do Neutrinos come from?

Astrophysical and/or Nuclear Neutrino Sources(from “Nature”, and Human-Generated)

Many Neutrinos from the Sun’s core…

Where on Earth is best to look for them…?

Some Neutrino Detectors…

Borexino

Super-Kamiokande

The Unusual Behaviors of Neutrinos can explain some key mysteries of our Universe!(e.g.: The “Solar Neutrino Problem”, Baryogenesis, (Some) Dark Matter…)