How Can the Sun Burn Without Oxygen?
We are used to the idea that candle flames and campfires cannot burn without supplies of oxygen. We also know that the sun is a blazing star. So we naturally assume that it, too, needs oxygen to keep going. Then we learn that there is little or no oxygen around the starry sun. Obviously it burns by some process that needs no oxygen and our 20th century scientists have discovered what this process is. The sun is a nuclear furnace that works by changing atoms. The tight fisted core of an atom is called the nucleus and the sun burns by nuclear fusion. It fuses the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to create larger atoms of helium. In the process, atomic particles are converted to atomic energy. On a much smaller scale, the same sort of nuclear fusion powers the H bomb. And neither the sun nor the H bomb needs oxygen to change atomic particles into nuclear energy.
This question is very troublesome to young space agers. It is not easy to grasp the difference between a star and a planet. Our sun is a star and we live on the planet earth. The sun is a seething ball of blazing gases. The earth is a cool ball of solids, liquids and gases. Our cozy log fires would seem cool on the seething sun. But we earthlings are used to them and we know that our kind of everyday fire cannot burn without oxygen gas to help it. If the sun burned logs and coal, it would soon turn to ashes. But it is a different kind of fire. It is an atomic furnace somewhat like a never ending hydrogen bomb. Its heat comes from hydrogen atoms changing into helium atoms. This kind of atomic energy needs no oxygen. The sun is a whopping nuclear furnace.
Nothing can burn on earth without the presence of oxygen. As what we call “fire” or “burning” is a chemical reaction in which atoms of oxygen combine with atoms of carbon from the fuel — the substance being burned — to produce carbon dioxide, light, and heat. Since fire needs oxygen, and there is almost no oxygen in space, then
