In stars, from where is oxygen for burning obtained?

Question

Every burning process requires oxygen & no oxygen is available in space for stars to burn endlessly for billons of years.

Answer 1

Stars do not "burn" oxygen in the sense of a fire consuming oxygen. They operate by nuclear fusion, converting hydrogen to helium. As the star ages, it will "burn" He and heavier elements, up to iron, in turn.

Very massive stars will, however, "burn" oxygen, but for very short times, only - less than a year - before they go supernova.

Answer 2

Stars are not burning. In fact, a puzzle for astronomers for a long time was that if the sun were burning in the conventional sense it could not last as long as it has.

The sun is primarily made up of hydrogen. In the core of the star the pressure and temperature are so great that hydrogen nuclei can fuse to form helium nuclei. This gives off huge amounts of energy, and this is emitted as light, heat, and various other types of radiation. It is the energy from nuclear fusion that causes the star to glow. It is not burning, therefore requires no oxygen.

Answer 3

The sun doesn't burn chemically- like in combustion on earth which does need oxygen.

The sun produces heat and light through a physical process - nuclear fusion of lighter elements to heavier elements, releasing energy via the famous equation E=mc^2.

In fact the sun is losing mass all the time, it is this mass that is converted to light and heat energy, the mass-defect due to the increase in binding energy as hydrogen forms helium.

Think of the sun as a nuclear fusion reactor rather than a burning ball of gas.

Answer 4

the sun does not perform combustion like we burn stuff here on earth. The reaction that occurs in sun. Its a nucler reaction. It breaks a helium atom into 2 hydrogen(deutrium) atoms and release a great amount of heat and this emits all sorts of radiation including visible light. Soon the the high temperature of the sun will cause fusion to occur, where 2 hydrogen atoms combine to form helium. This is an ongoing process. If the sun is fuled by oxygen it wont be the sun for so long.

Answer 5

Stars are not really burning in the sense of combustion to require oxygen.
The heat and light energy of stars come from a process called nuclear fusion. It is the process by which 2 light atoms having high speed and energy fuse together to form a heavier atom releasing energy and alpha rays

Answer 6

Stars don't "burn", as a rule. Actually, they convert hydrogen into helium by way of "fusion". When the core of the star is almost pure helium, pressure becomes so great and temperatures so high that the helium begins to convert into carbon and oxygen.

Answer 7

Well, ..., Basically, the Sun will run out of fuel one day and there is not way to replenish that fuel supply. Now, just one small clarification and that is the Sun doesn't burn. Burning is an oxidation process the Sun receives it's energy from a Fusion reaction. Now, like any engine or reaction, you've got to have energy for the engine or reaction to progress as well as stored potential energy in the way of fuel. In the same way the Sun fuses stored helium into deuterium. It runs out of helium it will fuse deuterium and on up until it comes to iron at which point fusion will stop. At that point it will have already swelled to the size of Earth's orbit as a red giant (consuming the Earth in the process) . After which our star will sluff off it's outer shell in a nova. After that wit will operate as a fission star (white dwarf) until it runs out of fissile material and tuns into cold cinder. See the link below for a more detailed explanation.

Answer 8

As the hydrogen burns in a star, a hot, dense core of helium is formed that fuels the nucleosynthesis of the heavier elements. The first stage of this process is the so-called "triple-alpha" capture to form 12C, followed by the subsequent capture of alpha particles to form 16O. In essence, helium burning terminates there, because further alpha captures (to form 20Ne, for example) occur too slowly at these temperatures and densities to be significant.

The termination of helium burning at 16O was not realized at the time of B2FH, because of uncertainty in the level structure of 20Ne near the alpha+16O threshold. However, it was later discovered that the levels closest to the threshold had the wrong parity and/or angular momentum to make a large resonant contribution to the rate. A calculation by Fowler et al. [Fow75] showed that the rate for 16O( alpha,gamma) 20Ne is far below that for 12C(alpha, gamma)16O for T9<=0.2. Therefore, the blocking of further alpha captures for normal helium-burning conditions allows us to concentrate on triple-alpha and alpha+16O capture in the following discussion. Although the formulas used to describe the rates of these reactions are essentially unchanged from forty years ago, the major advance has been the experimental determination, with great precision in some cases, of the nuclear parameters upon which the expressions depend.

Answer 9

Stars do not chemically burn a fuel/oxygen mixture. The source of heat is the nuclear fusion of atoms compressed by gravity. 4 hydrogen nuclei are fused into 1 helium atom, and the excess mass is converted to energy (heat) according to Einstein's E=mc^2.

Answer 10

no oxygen is not there to burn. only hydrogen is chemically changed into helium to give heat and light. for eg if u keep a burning splinter in hydrogen the gas burns