Where dose all that hydrogen come from ?

Question

If our sun is powered by hydrogen where dose it come from ? There must be a finite supply of hydrogen for use as fuel. It would seem to me that the supply would be quickly exhaused. Yet the sun is billions of years old. Where dose the hydrogen come from to sustain the continued fusion reaction within the sun.

So far most answers have said when. The big bang this dose not answer my question where.
A where would be the Sun, Mercury, or perhaps some process I'm not aware of. Where is the location of all this hydrogen used in fission ?

Answer 1

All the hydrogen in the universe was created after the 'Big Bang'.

The 'Big Bang' consisted of one huge explosion (so the theory goes). Soon after the big bang the energy started to condense to form matter.

The easiest element, and most favourable in terms of energy, to form is hydrogen since it consists of a proton and electron only. It is estimated that 75% of the mass of the universe is hydrogen. This makes for a lot of hydrogen.

The Sun is composed of hydrogen (about 74% of its mass), helium (about 25% of mass, 7% of volume), and trace quantities of other elements.

The Sun powers itself by converting hydrogen into heavier element, and then fusing these heavier elements into yet heavier. This process stops at iron as it is not energy favouarble to fuse iron into heavier elements. Elements heavier than Iron are created during Supa Nova (exploding stars).

The Sun's current age, determined using computer models of stellar evolution is thought to be about 4.5 billion years.

The Sun is about halfway through its main-sequence cycle. Each second, more than 4 million tonnes of matter are converted into energy within the Sun's core, producing neutrinos and solar radiation; The Sun will spend approximately 10 billion years as a main sequence star before expanding to a Red Giant then shrinking to a White Dwarf (it doesn't have sufficient mass to explode as a Supa Nova).

Edit
Hydrogen isn't used in fission ut used in fusion.
The hydrogen comes from the Big Bang. Originally the Big Bang consisted of pure energy in the form of radiation. As the rapidly expanding universe cooled this energy condensed into matter. The easiest form of matter to produce is hydrogen. So there is your answer.

If you want to know where the energy came from then neither I or any other physicist or cosmologist can tell you because we simply do not know. In fact we can only speculate what happened and there are several theories...
http://superstringtheory.com/cosmo/cosmo4.html

Answer 2

Hydrogen is the most abundant form of matter in the universe and was created at the big bang. This is because it is the simplest atom to form. All other atoms are formed by the combination of hydrogen atoms through nuclear fusion- like that happening in the sun- into heavier elements. The sun does have a finite supply of hydrogen, but there is so much of it that it won't run out any time soon. I think the forecast is that it has at least several hundred billion years left. Because nuclear fusion releases so much energy, the sun can use relatively small amounts of hydrogen to produce vast amounts of energy.

Answer 3

It comes from the Sun. The Sun is extremely massive, and the fusion reaction releases an incredible amount of energy per unit mass (E = mc^2, remember?) so there's enough hydrogen there to keep going for a few more billion years yet.

I think the real problem we all have with this is that we just can't imagine things that are so far beyond the scale of everyday life on little old Earth.

Answer 4

Aside from the idiot who tries to talk about flaws in theories he doesn't understand, your problem is that you are talking about fission (which is for heavy elements) and should be talking about fusion. In fusion, the tiny change in mass produces a huge amount of energy (E=MC^2) so the hydrogen is "used up" very slowly. The gravity the guy says makes the center of the sun impossible makes the center so condensed that his scenario won't work. The fusion energy created drives the mass apart (when the fusion stops, the sun collapses) and makes it turbulant. And remember that helium is heavier than hydrogen, making his bouyancy arguement sludge.
The same kind of thinking as you are using was done to "prove" that the Earth couldn't be as old as said (so God created it) until it was worked out that radioactive elements in the core generate heat and make the age quite reasonable.

Answer 5

Hydrogen was the most abundant element formed by the big bang, enormous clouds of it condensed into stars where fusion creates radiation and heat as the hydrogen is converted into helium. Four million tons of hyrogen is used each and every second in the sun, but this vast amount of hydrogen is not lost, most of the mass still remains; the small amount of mass that is converted into pure energy is why the sun will be around for billions of years to come.

Answer 6

A region of extremely high temperature will spontaneously produce proton - antiproton and electron-positron pairs from the vacuum due to particle collisions. This is what happened during the big bang. Hydrogen is just a proton bound to an electron. Where all the antiprotons and positrons when is still somewhat of a mystery, although it has been demonstrated experimentally that they do not *necessily* have to be produced in exactly equal numbers.

Answer 7

You have struck a sensitive cord here. There are actually three distinct problems with the current sun theory. The first is that were you to determine mass acceleration 400 miles from the center of our sun, you would find that were a mass able to be released at that location and free to fall, that mass would exceed the speed of light in one second. A mass cannot exist in a location where it has the potential of exceeding the speed of light. This means that there is a 800 mile diameter location within our sun where mass cannot exist.

This leads to the second concept. Were it actually hydrogen that had to migrate through the mass of the sun toward its center (this is discounting the problem of a 800 mile diameter where mass cannot exist) in order to have the pressure and temperature to fuse it into helium, it would be headed in the wrong direction. Lighter gasses and mass rise upward toward lesser surrounding pressure, not downward into greater pressure.

Then there is the problem of all that helium. It (using their own standard) would have to fill the volume of the center of our sun thus causing greater diffusion of hydrogen so the hydrogen would have greater and greater impurity.

The concept is nonsense.

Answer 8

There is a finite supply of hydrogen. The supply will be exhausted..but not anytime soon

Answer 9

you must understand that the mass of hydrogen is such that it has collapsed on itself due to the extreme gravitational field.....causing intense heat build up....in turn igniting the gas...the core is so dense that it is no longer a gas..or even a liquid.....it is hard to imagine....but the core is nearly solid.

Answer 10

The cooling tower malfunctioned, inflicting it to advance tension interior the coolant tanks interior the form. What you suspect become easily one large concrete balloon being popped. p.s; thankfully, it is different of what happened at chernobyl, the placement the stress relatively equipped up interior the reactor, inflicting it to extremely pop it is suitable and start up off spewing out radioactive fabric.