There’s a fun article at Forbes in which astrophysicist Ethan Siegel reminds us that stars of the incubators of elements other than helium. There’s a lot more fusion going on in stars than the nuclear fusion of hydrogen in helium.
There’s a fun article at Forbes in which astrophysicist Ethan Siegel reminds us that stars of the incubators of elements other than helium. There’s a lot more fusion going on in stars than the nuclear fusion of hydrogen in helium.
Siegel’s out of ideas, I gather. Or at least out of fresh and exciting ones than can be explained to laymen in 800 words or less. But Hans Bethe and Fred Hoyle and other folks were theorizing about the precise mechanisms behind colliding particles and solar fusion back around 1950. (I remember a cousin of mine built an electronic display with dozens of little light bulbs to show the Bethe Cycle for a science fair project in pre-Sputnik days.)
Hey, if it were easy, we’d have had fusion power plants fifty years ago!