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Posted on 02/26/2008 6:40:53 AM PST by xzins
Apostate!
Great news. This means that when I’m riding my two-cycle jetski and filling the atmosphere with Earth Warming Greenhouse Gases, I’m simply doing my part to stave off the coming Ice Age.
Fire up those ATVs, Waverunners and Escalades people.
Our planet needs you.
How long will it take for the Gore-Istas to claim that a colder planet is the result of Global Warming?
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All this time I thought it was Algore and the global warming hysteria /s
The gravitational pull of my two teenagers completely refutes Copernican Theory.
That’s right. We’re all way too smart for that clap-trap.
Everyone knows that the Prophet Algore is the only one who can save the earth.
“”There is a reason scientists refer to our current era as an “interglacial period”, i.e., a time between Ice Ages. “”
This is wrong. An interglacial is an interval of warmer global average temperature that separates glacial periods WITHIN an ice age. Most folks don’t realize that we are still in an Ice Age.
The Earth has left its orbit and is now heading towards the sun. An artist, Norma, and her landlady, Mrs. Bronson, are the last people in their building, the rest having moved north where it is cooler, (or, presumably, died from the heat). They try to keep each other company as electricity is rationed and food and water are scrounged for, but the landlady collapses and dies. The thermometer creeps past 140 degrees, and shatters. As her oil paintings melt from the heat, Norma screams and also collapses.The scene cuts to the apartment at night. In the darkness outside, it's snowing. Norma is bedridden with a high fever, and attended by Mrs. Bronson and a doctor. She was actually only dreaming that the Earth was moving towards the sun.
In reality, the Earth is moving away from the Sun, which will eventually cause everything to freeze over.
The Left is the scourge of the planet. The world will not know peace until the Left disappears.
DUMB QUESTIONS HERE:
Since the sun is constantly burning, does it ever get smaller, and use up its fuel?
And how does it burn in space where there is no oxygen?
a new sunspot has just appeared Is this the beginning of cycle # 24$
How can a star burn with no oxygen?
Can a fire burn in a room with no oxygen?
A fire cannot burn without oxygen. You can show this for yourself, in fact: if you light a small candle and then put a clear glass upside-down over that candle (without touching the flame), you can watch the flame slowly extinguish as it uses up all of the oxygen that you have trapped around it with the glass.
What if in that same room, with no oxygen, is it possible for a hydrogen reaction fire to start, like the sun?
The way the Sun “burns” fuel is completely different from the way a fire on Earth burns (the term “burning” is a bit misleading when used to talk about stars). The Sun gets its energy by smashing small light elements together to make heavier elements; most of a star’s life is spent smashing hydrogen atoms together to make helium. The burning that a star does, then, is a nuclear reaction, and not a chemical one like the fires on Earth (when a candle burns, the atoms themselves remain unchanged: just the molecules are affected).
If not, how did the sun start to burn without oxygen?
So, the Sun can “burn” hydrogen to helium without the need for oxygen. It should be noted that in the presence of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, stars heavier than the Sun may burn hydrogen to helium by using the C, N and O as catalysts. Even in these stars, however, an absence of oxygen does not prevent nuclear burning.
Is it true that the Sun burns off a billion tons of gas every 5 seconds?
I heard an incredible claim that the Sun burns off a billion tons of gas every 5 seconds. Is this true?
It is true that the Sun burns several hundred million tons of hydrogen per second, converting it to helium by nuclear fusion. This the source of the Sun’s energy, and if the Sun were consuming gas at less than this rate, then we would not get the required warmth to support life. However, there is no cause of alarm, because there is a HUGE amount of hydrogen in the Sun. The total mass of the sun is 2 x 1033 grams, out of which a small fraction of it is be used for nuclear reactions. If you calculate the age of the Sun based on the amount of gas consumed per second, you will find that the Sun can live for about 10 billion years.
He'll only agree to save the planet if you send him all your money.....
How do you calculate the lifetime of the Sun?
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=285
How can I calculate the age of the sun using classical physics? I know it’s estimated to have a life of about 10 billion years, but was this calculated?
It requires a bit more than classical physics, but still, you can estimate the sun’s lifetime from a very simple calculation.
First of all, if you want the current age of the sun (around 5 billion years) this number is determined from radioactive dating of objects in the solar system which are known to have formed around the same time as the sun, as stated in the answer to a previous question.
The total lifetime of the sun before it becomes a red giant is, as you say, around 10 billion years (meaning that the transition will occur around 5 billion years from now). This can be estimated by assuming that the sun will “die” when it runs out of energy to keep it shining. The time for this to occur is roughly the total energy the sun has that can be turned into light, divided by the rate at which the sun is giving off energy, or:
lifetime = (energy) / (rate [energy/time] at which sun emits energy)
The rate at which the sun emits energy (its luminosity) is around 3.8 x 1026 Watts (that’s the number 38 followed by 25 zeroes - quite a lot of lightbulbs!). This number can be determined from measurements of how bright the sun appears from Earth as well as its distance from us.
The total energy that the sun has to burn requires a little extra knowledge (for example, some nuclear physics) to understand. We know that the sun shines via nuclear reactions in the core that transform four hyrogen atoms into one helium atom. If you look at a periodic table, you will see that one helium atom has a little less mass than four hydrogen atoms combined; about 0.7% of the original mass has “disappeared”. This “missing mass” gets transformed into energy, and this is the energy that causes the sun to shine. Therefore, using Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2 for the conversion between mass and energy we have that the available energy in the sun is:
E = 0.007 x M c2
where c is the speed of light and M is the amount of mass in the sun that is capable of undergoing the above nuclear reactions.
Now, it turns out that only the central part of the sun is at a high enough temperature to actually undergo these reactions. You would need to use a detailed model of the sun’s structure to figure out exactly how much of the sun is at a high enough temperature, but if we’re just estimating things we can say that on the order of 10% of the sun’s mass is in the central part of the sun where it is hot enough to undergo nuclear reactions. We then have:
E = 0.007 x 0.1 x Msun c2
where Msun is the total mass of the sun, 2 x 1030 kilograms. We therefore can calculate that the total energy the sun has to burn is around 1.3 x 1044 Joules. Dividing 3.8 x 1026 Watts (the rate at which the sun is giving off energy) into this number gives an approximate value of 10 billion years for the sun’s lifetime.
November 2002, Dave Rothstein (more by Dave Rothstein)
Related questions:
Is it true that the Sun burns off a billion tons of gas every 5 seconds?
How do we know the age of the Universe and the Earth?
Will the sun go supernova in six years and destroy Earth (as seen on Yahoo)?
When the Sun converts mass to energy, do the orbits of the planets change?
I loved that Zone.
The shot of the paint melting off the canvas at the end gave me nightmares as a child.
(well so did the Emergency Broadcast tone, so I guess I was just strange)
ping
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