I always wondered whether the sun was really made up of H and He. Beside spectral signatures, is there proof that the sun is really made of those elements?
Which kind of proofs will you be willing to accept?
Please, be specific. "Reasonable" or "logic" have very broad meanings, so it is better to estate clearly what kind of proofs you are willing to accept before starting any discussion.
Now, I let others to answer your question ;-)
At the outer skirts the sun will keep its lighter atoms. Eruptions may show something from its internals. It is sure that the sun keeps its heavy stuff in its internals. But this is just common sense reasoning.
Hans,
If the sun’s gravity is strong enough to attract and fuse H in its core, how come that solar wind escapes so forcefully in the opposite direction that it even reaches the heliopause?
Can we demonstrate today that H which is found on the outskirts of the solar system is still being attracted towards the sun?
Do we have an estimate of the mass of H the sun injected in the solar system since it was formed till today?
I guess that the answer can be found in the shorter and longer ranges of existing forces.
Jesús,
Solar wind H leaves the sun and ends in the solar system. Since the sun started emitting solar wind, how much H has accumulated in the solar system?
Will this H be attracted back to the sun or will it stay where it is?
According to the solar theory, Sisyphus is the disk of the sun that rises every day in the east and then sinks into the west. Other scholars regard him as a personification of waves rising and falling, or of the treacherous sea. The 1st-century BC Epicurean philosopher Lucretius interprets the myth of Sisyphus as personifying politicians aspiring for political office who are constantly defeated, with the quest for power, in itself an "empty thing", being likened to rolling the boulder up the hill. Friedrich Welcker suggested that he symbolises the vain struggle of man in the pursuit of knowledge, and Salomon Reinach that his punishment is based on a picture in which Sisyphus was represented rolling a huge stone Acrocorinthus, symbolic of the labour and skill involved in the building of the Sisypheum. Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, saw Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life, but Camus concludes "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" as "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
Ni Ha,
I trust in your ability to compute these things by yourself. I could only compute them assuming the sun is made of H/He what you refuse to accept.
About the Sisyphus stuff, I don't know what you mean with it.
Ni Ha,
if you learn how the astronomical techniques work you will know that there's no such illusion. If you don't know how they work whatever I can tell you based on them you could tell me that you don't trust on me so better if you learn it by yourself and convince yourself that there is no illusion.
Ni Ha,
I'm on holidays so its time for other to do the hard work... I let you time to look for answers to your questions and for others to take the podium.
Ciaociao
No, I was in a nice place called La Gomera with no boars but billy goats ;-)
I have to say, this conversation is not very much about cosmology. It would be nice to focus on the group's interests, since this is a cosmology discussion page.
Let us also try to be more constructive in our aims, instead of just trying to contradict everything we hear. Scientific methodology is very specific. Given the fact that you have been yourself in a physics lab, during your training, and tested most of the fundamental principles yourself, science for the individual researcher becomes 99% trust and 1% distrust; this 1% will be used to test things in your field.
According to the PFO-CFO Hypothesis of Solar System Formation, which is available in the publications disposed at my and Elena Kadyshevich RG pages, the Sun and other stars are the knots in the eternal and endless space and the space is the mass/energy of a low potential. The stars transform under gravitation; therewith, all chemical elements originate in the star vicinities with no fusion reactions but from the radioactive and non-radioactive piko-drops and the stellar radiation is mainly resulted from the chemical-radiation reactions. The details are described in our publications.
The proof may be indirect but many internally self-consistent numerical models of sun and stars have been produced that agree to varying degrees with the observational data.These models must begin with a composition and the one that works is one with ~0.74% hydrogen and ~0.24% helium.
The H and He might arise from nuclear reactions rather than indicate that the sun is composed of these elements. My hypothesis is that the sun is made of heavier elements (U, etc) "condensing" thus reaching critical mass but then expanding to stop temporarily more reaction. That expansion and contraction could account for the sun's cycles.
I'll try another approach: the sun emits energy. The energy is being generated within the sun. The sun is stable - it is not contracting thereby releasing gravitational energy. The current explanation is that deep in the solar interior hydrogen is being converted into helium by thermonuclear processes. Given the initial abundances of hydrogen and helium that I cited above the models reproduce the observational data quite well. So apply Occam's razor to the effect of why introduce new complications when the current model fits what is observed in stars including the sun.
It seems to me that the expansion/contraction and critical mass of heavier elements model fits Occam's principle better than the thermonuclear model. Suppose a balloon filled with H2 is released in space. Will it fall towards the sun or away from it? Now suppose a heavy metal is similarly released. In which direction will it move? I think an experiment by NASA would settle the question.
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