Started by Arash Mohammadi (@arash_m) ·
the sun's core makes less heat per cubic meter than a compost heap
The core produces apparently a few hundred watts per cubic meter, roughly like a compost pile or a lizard's metabolism. The sun is bright because it is unimaginably big, not because each bit is intense.
6 sources · 27 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- How does the sun manage fusion at only ~15 million degrees?
- Ended at
- Neutrino oscillation
The Trail
- “sun core power density compost” (google.com)
- Sun (en.wikipedia.org)
- Proton–proton chain (en.wikipedia.org)
- Quantum tunnelling (en.wikipedia.org)
protons shouldn't get close enough to fuse at the sun's temperature. tunneling cheats
- Solar neutrino problem (en.wikipedia.org)
- Neutrino oscillation (en.wikipedia.org)
Keep going
- in 1991 one particle hit the atmosphere with the energy of a thrown baseball · Arash Mohammadi · 6 sources
- the 'Woodstock of Physics' was a 1987 superconductor session that ran past 3am · Arash Mohammadi · 6 sources
- you can measure the brain's magnetic field, which is absurdly faint · Quinn Harlow · 6 sources
- a second is 9,192,631,770 wiggles of a cesium atom · Dev Malhotra · 5 sources