If there is no oxygen in space...?

Question

then how can the sun 'survive'? I thought fire requires oxygen?

Answer 1

The sun is not a fire. If it was going by oxidizing chemicals, it would have gone out after a few hundred thousand years max. Rather, the Sun shines through a fusion reaction, squeezing hydrogen atoms together into helium and getting energy in the process. No oxygen is required.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Core
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion

Answer 2

It is a nuclear fusion, sweetie, no need for oxygen. It's not a fire in the normal sense, it is a thermonuclear bomb. As George Bush would say, nukeyouler.

Fire on earth is oxiding, combining heat and oxygen to burn. The wood in a fireplace blazing away on a cold winter night is oxidizing the logs. Same thing which the rust on a car fender; the steel is oxidizing and turning to rust, in effect the fender is burning, although at a very slow rate and you do not see a flame, but it is the same process. Even aluminum burns (aluminum oxide) although much slower that iron (iron oxide, common rust).This process requires oxygen. The sun is burning on the atomic level in the reaction of H and He.

Answer 3

No oxygen. Only a very little bit of hydrogen. As the other say here, the sun does not "burn" in the sense that fire burns on Earth.

Answer 4

The sun is Not a Fire. The sun is a gigantic nuclear fusion reactor.

The sun, like almost all typical stars, is an enormous collection of hydrogen and helium, along with small amounts of heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, and others. The sheer mass of the sun compresses the hydrogen atoms until they combine, forming a helium atom. The process releases an enormous amount of energy. (Think of the power unleashed when we split atoms in the forms of power reactors and nuclear bombs. The process releases similar amounts of energy, although we split atoms, while the sun "builds" them.)

There are enormous supplies of hydrogen in the sun, since it is the most common element in the Universe, so the sun should "burn" for millions of years.

Answer 5

The sun is a product of necular fusion.The Sun's energy output (3.86e33 ergs/second or 386 billion billion megawatts) is produced by nuclear fusion reactions. Each second about 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted to about 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons (=3.86e33 ergs) of energy in the form of gamma rays. As it travels out toward the surface, the energy is continuously absorbed and re-emitted at lower and lower temperatures so that by the time it reaches the surface, it is primarily visible light. For the last 20% of the way to the surface the energy is carried more by convection than by radiation.

Answer 6

About 74% of the Sun's mass is hydrogen, 25% is helium, and the rest is made up of trace quantities of heavier elements. Because of this, there are no craters on the sun, as it is entirely made up of gas. The Sun has a spectral class of G2V. "G2" means that it has a surface temperature of approximately 5,500 K, giving it a white color, which because of atmospheric scattering appears yellow. Its spectrum contains lines of ionized and neutral metals as well as very weak hydrogen lines.From about 0.2 to about 0.7 solar radii, solar material is hot and dense enough that thermal radiation is sufficient to transfer the intense heat of the core outward. In this zone there is no thermal convection; while the material grows cooler as altitude increases, this temperature gradient is slower than the adiabatic lapse rate and hence cannot drive convection. Heat is transferred by radiation—ions of hydrogen and helium emit photons, which travel a brief distance before being reabsorbed by other ions.

From about 0.7 solar radii to the Sun's visible surface, the material in the Sun is not dense enough or hot enough to transfer the heat energy of the interior outward via radiation. As a result, thermal convection occurs as thermal columns carry hot material to the surface (photosphere) of the Sun. Once the material cools off at the surface, it plunges back downward to the base of the convection zone, to receive more heat from the top of the radiative zone. Convective overshoot is thought to occur at the base of the convection zone, carrying turbulent downflows into the outer layers of the radiative zone.

Answer 7

There is a little tiny bit of oxygen in space, hardly at all. But the sun is not fire.

Answer 8

It's not fire. Its a thermonuclear reaction. If it was fire, it would not be hot enough, at 93,000,000 miles away, to make any difference to us.

P.S. Kat W, the sun does not support the whole galaxy. You're mixing up galaxy and solar system as a term. Yes, there are presumably billions of other solar systems around other stars. Or star systems, more correctly, since "solar" refers to our star, specifically, named Sol.

Answer 9

The Sun isn't a fire. Its a star. They are giant balls of gas and the Sun just happens to be big enough to support a Galaxy. There could be lots of galaxies somewhere else in space revolving round other Suns.

Pretty cool thought huh,

Answer 10

It's called "nuclear fusion". You'll learn about it when you grow up and start high school.