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Scientists have successfully confirmed their understanding of the Sun’s nuclear fusion, for the first time, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.
This means that we have the key to discovering how the stars – the vital blood of the universe as we know it – create the foundational elements that make up everyone and every planet, forever.
RELATED: RESEARCHERS MAKE NUCLEAR FUSION SAFER AND MORE STABLE IN UNPRECEDENTED DISCOVERY
Scientists decode the sun’s nuclear fusion process, the universal engine
The study showed how our star performs a process called the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) fusion cycle – which uses elements that are heavier than scientists expected a star the size of the sun. Basically, this confirms that the CNO cycle exists on an empirical basis – a task left hanging since the process was first issued in the 1930s, Futurism reports.
Earlier attempts to understand the sun’s nuclear fusion would have generated incompatible data – since it came from indirect sources, according to a press release from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Futurism reports.
Scientists thought only large stars used CNO cycles
This follows an earlier study in June, from the journal Nature – which first announced the detection of crucial neutrinos. But it took the Borexino detector team several months to confirm their results.
Inside a Borexino detector – an underground facility based in Italy – a team of more than 100 scientists noticed CNO neutrinos coming from the sun – something scientists thought only larger stars could collect, because they contain elements much heavier than ours.
CNO-type nuclear fusion difficult to detect in our sun
Most of the existing stars are much larger than our modest yellow sun: Betelgeuse, a giant red star, is about 20 times as massive and about 700 times the diameter of the sun.
The larger stars are also much hotter than ours, making them primarily fueled by CNO fusion – which fuses helium with hydrogen via the transformation of atomic nuclei in an endless loop between oxygen, the carbon and nitrogen, reports NBC.
As the dominant energy source in the universe, CNO is surprisingly hard to find inside our relatively warm sun – which comprises only 1% of its total energy.
Neutrinos are ideal for detecting long-range nuclear reactions
The colossal Borexino detector searches for neutrinos fired into space during nuclear fusion in the nasty hellish core of the sun.
Neutrinos are particularly difficult to study because they pass through most materials without any interaction. But that is precisely why they are so fascinating – because they provide a source of information for long-range nuclear reactions.
Understanding the sun helps unravel universal mysteries
In fact, billions of sliding neutrinos from our sun zoom through the Borexino detector every second, and it can only detect dozens of them per day – evidenced by faint flashes of light as the particles decay inside the reservoir. 300 tons of water, worryingly dark.
With an estimated diameter of 93 billion light years, the observable universe is vast. But across that space, in the midst of roughly 1 billion trillion stars, a relatively tiny facility in Italy detected just enough neutrinos from our modest yellow sun to unlock the universal engine behind every star – nuclear fusion, a form of electricity generation that we might someday. harness for our own energy needs.
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