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What Makes the Sun Shine?

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Essential Astrophysics

Part of the book series: Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics ((ULNP))

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Abstract

When we measure the total amount of sunlight that illuminates and warms our globe, and extrapolate back to the Sun, we find that it is emitting an enormous power of 385.4 million, million, million, million, or 3.828 × 1026 watts, where one watt = 1 J s−1. This brilliance is far too great to be perpetually sustained, and we therefore wonder what heats the Sun, and how long that heat will last.

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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lang, K. (2013). What Makes the Sun Shine?. In: Essential Astrophysics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35963-7_8

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