…and just couldn’t find them. Hans had written a sequel to his story (all good fairy tales have sequels),and in his new fairy tale the sun didn’t shine (just?) from hydrogen fusion; it shone from carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) fusion, too. Or instead of. Or something else entirely. Who could tell? The sneaky solar neutrinos were always playing tricky tricks that had the kindly old physicists pulling their hair out trying to understand until they got so old they didn’t have hair to pull out any more.
But the good guys always win at the end of every fairy tale. The heroic physicists just recently FINALLY figured out what those tricky little neutrinos have been doing all along, and in the latest post-game wrap-up, the physicists have concluded last month that the sun’s neutrinos show at most a 7.5% reliance on CNO fusion, with the remainder being good old-fashioned hydrogen fusion. If future neutrino observation experiments can drop that number still lower to 1.5%, which would match current theoretical predictions, we could all live happily ever after. That is, until the sun runs out of hydrogen fuel in a few billion years, but that’s another story…
Actually, as the article suggests, it takes four Hydrogen atoms to make a Helium atom. The reaction is the pp chain:
So six protons go in, two protons and a Helium 4 nucleus come out, along with about 24MeV (some of which is imparted to the neutrino nu_e, and is rarely detected at Earth). The e^- and e^+ are the electron and positron, respectively.
Sorry for being an anal retentive ^_^
No problem, you are right. It’s not anal retentive to be right. Never forget that the whole purpose of science journalisn is to “dumb down” the truth to be understandable by a wider audience, and that it’s VERY EASY to go across a line and dumb it down too much. Guys like me need guys like you to keep us all of us on our toes.