What keeps the sun burning without exploding or running out of fuel.?

Question

I already know that hydrogen is converted to helium by fusion. That still doesn;t answer the question for me. What is fueling the sun? Why doesnt it run out. How can it stay burning without being consumed. How does it not run out of fuel. What keeps that fireball from exploding. How can it keep burining for thousands and millions of years. I have already read the usual explanation of fusion. I still want to know exactly how it can burn so long without running out of whatever is burning.

Answer 1

Mass. The sun is massive, and this both fuels it's burn as well as keeps it from exploding. Some day the suns fuel will burn out, and it will not only burn out, but will explode, or more accurately, it will expand into a red giant.

Answer 2

These are all good questions. Let's start with the easier one: Why doesn't it run out. It will run out eventually, and a new phase in the Sun's life, will start. The Sun as we know it will keep burning for approximately another 5 billion years. That is how long his current fuel will last. The sun has so much fuel because it is much more massive than the Earth. (It has a mass of more than 330 thousand times the mass of the Earth!) The Sun is fueled by hydrogen, and fusion into helium happens because of the high temperatures that exist in the Sun's core.

Answer 3

The sun is a star. Inside the core there are fusion reactions that are going on for millions of years. You have already answered the question yourself. The sun contains Hydrogen which it converts into helium. The sun has a life of about 5 billion years more. The size of the sun is very large and the composition is about 92.1% Hydrogen so it does have a lot of fuel. I hope this answers your questions . I have also given the website underneath to help you in understanding the problem.

Answer 4

Stars explode or die when the nuclear reactions cease to occur. When this happens, the gravity trying to crush the star inwards will overcome the outwards force of the heat emitted, and the matter will be squeezed into a smaller volume. This can build up a lot of heat and the pressure will be intense. Sometimes, these conditions get so extreme that a reaction is set off that causes the star to explode as a supernova. The remains will either form a neutron star, or, if the remains weigh more than about 3 Suns, they will collapse into a single point and form a black hole. It is unknown what kind of conditions are prevalent inside a black hole, because the event horizon prevents us from seeing inside. Also, the force of gravity in a black hole would rip anything apart before it would get a chance to go anywhere else, so unless we find a way to overcome this tidal force, we will never know if they allow time travel.

Answer 5

Hydrogen is fueling the Sun, but it is not burning. Burning is a chemical reaction where hydrogen combines with oxygen to make water and energy. The Sun uses a nuclear reaction where hydrogen combines with more hydrogen to make helium and energy. Since nuclear reactions do not require oxygen, it does not matter that there is none in space. And the amount of energy is millions of times more that fire could make, so comparatively little hydrogen needs to be used up each year.

It does not run out because it is so big. Tons of fuel are used up every second, but there are billions of billions of tons of hydrogen in the Sun, so it will last a long time. You can't just think about it and have it seem OK, you have to do the math. The numbers and math are below. I did not make these numbers up, as unbelievable as they appear.
The mass of the Sun is:
1,988,435,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.
(darn, Yahoo won’t let me write a number that big. It is 1,988,435,(and 24 zeroes)
Numbers that big are usually expressed in scientific notation but I wrote it as a regular number both for the shock effect and for the benefit of people not familiar with scientific notation.
150,000,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted into helium every second. Dividing those two numbers says that there is enough hydrogen in the Sun to last 13,256,233,333,333,333,333 seconds. Dividing by the number of seconds in a year gives 420,352,401,488 years. (420 billion years). However, the Sun is only expected to last about 10 billion years for other reasons. So it has PLENTY of fuel.

It doesn't explode because its gravity is stronger than the force of the nuclear reactions trying to make it blow up. The Sun's gravity is 27 times stronger than the Earth's.

Answer 6

It actually is exploding. Mostly gravity keeps it together, but pieces are blown off as solar prominences. The prominences go out into space, but generally fall back under the gravity.

The sun loses a lot of mass as it burns. About 4 million metric tons every second. Wow. But it weighs about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 million metric tons. So it would last about 160 billion years at that rate. Of course, long before that it will undergo dramatic changes as the energy/gravity balance shifts.

Note that there are differences between my numbers and the ones above. One difference is that he is saying how much hydrogen reacts, while I'm talking about how much that hydrogen weighs minus the helium that is formed. For your question, the difference doesn't mean much.

Answer 7

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