Recent content by turboguppy

Unfortunately the very first line on that source is not correct. The sun does NOT shine because of fusion. The sun shines because it is hot. Fusion is a by-product and replenishes lost energy so that the sun may shine for a long time, but fusion doesn't cause the sun to shine. I'm...

I was of course referring to those simulations that are 3D and work through the creation of many, many stars starting with a massive cloud of gas. I don't remember how long the program I watched took to run, surely not a whole year, but I have been known to exaggerate a little to keep things...

Wow, I didn't expect the topic would revive so dramatically! Thanks for all the great info Ken G. I have been doing a lot of reading lately about how the internal structures of the stars (radiative zones vs convective) and opacity are what influence the Mass-Luminosity relationship at...

To add somewhat to what qraal said, and as some others have pointed out: It's probably easier to think of atmospheric retention (or loss) in terms of heat and escape velocity. Planets close to the sun receive more heat than do planets further away. You can think of heat roughly as how fast...

Jupiter gives off more energy than it receives from the sun: Luminosity. Also, we're not talking about a LAW law, we're talking about a power law--since there's a strong correlation between the Log(Mass) and Log(Luminosity) of main sequence stars, we can apply an empirical power law to show...