this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
442 points (97.4% liked)
Science
3640 readers
165 users here now
General discussions about "science" itself
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm studying Physics at the moment and Prof. gave us a printout of a textbook last week stating that the internal of the sun generates approximately 150 W / m³ on average. That's about as much as a compost pile, so, not very much. The sun only generates enormous amounts of power because it's so huge. In other words, reproducing fusion on Earth might actually not be very efficient.
I'm pretty sure the reason for that is that the sun is actually mostly not hot enough to do nuclear fusion, but has to instead rely on quantum tunnelling. This makes the fusion rate much, much lower. Now while this is good, because otherwise, the sun would burn up far too quickly and kill all of us, it also explains the low power, or energy per time.
Source: Doing my master's in cosmology.