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The Sun’s Littlest Secret (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]
“Every time we get slapped down, we can say, ‘Thank you, Mother Nature,’ because it means we’re about to learn something important.” -John Bahcall
And what’s possibly more important than learning how the Sun works? For nearly all of human history — well into the 20th century — we really didn’t know.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI).
Could it have been combustion, like we see on Earth? Or perhaps gravitational contraction, like that which powers white dwarf stars?
No, it turned out to be nuclear fusion. Yet when we built our best models and went to test what we expected to see with what we actually observed, it was the smallest particles that didn’t add up: the neutrino. For decades, we kept observing only a third the number we expected.
Image credit: Michael B. Smy, via http://www.ps.uci.edu/~smy/solar/solarfusion.html.
Here’s the story of how we solved that mystery, and finally figured out what goes on inside the Sun!
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2015/03/11/the-suns-littlest-secret-synopsis/
