Gadgetory

the core of the Sun this is a soup of electrons and protons we call plasma where the former would normally orbit the latter in this case billions and billions of them move freely around in a dense hot climate and we aren't talking desert hot try 15 million degrees Celsius and it's important because temperatures and pressures this high allow free-roaming protons to reach a critical speed you see protons are positively charged and as such naturally repel each other thanks to the column force that's also called the electromagnetic force think of identical magnetic poles being squished together right there's a repelling force there and it's the same principle with protons but when trillions of psi and millions of degrees Celsius or mixed in protons smash into each other by managing to overcome the column force instead succumbing to the nuclear force and stars around the size of our Sun this proton proton collision ultimately drives the fusion process that warms our planet when one proton smashes into another a few things happen first one of the protons in the new deuterium nucleus becomes a neutron this is actually a rare event typically the two fused protons just decay back into separate particles without anything else happening but enough deuterium is produced every second to sustain the chain reaction inside our star and we'll assume that's what's happening here so at this point two smaller particles are yielded a positron and a neutrino and a process called beta plus decay the previously positive charge of the converted neutron is transferred to the smaller positron which is an electron with a positive charge instead of a negative one the other particle a neutrino is an electron with no charge at all the positron will almost immediately collide with an electron yielding two gamma rays which are hyper charged light particles gamma rays are the things that cause cancer by penetrating and breaking down cellular DNA it's bad as for the neutrinos well you're being bombarded with billions of those every second but they rarely interact with nature so you don't have to worry they're very small and they are neutral hence the name neutrino now back to our deuteron within seconds it fuses with another proton creating helium-3 or helium a gamma ray is also released with a significantly higher energy state in the previous reaction and at this point helium-3 must become helium four somehow so yeah it gets dicey the problem is that there are several ways to make for so we'll discuss the two most common methods method one involves two helium nuclei as long as temperatures are somewhere in the range of 10 to 12 million Kelvin they're able to smash into each other and yield helium 4 along with 2 protons and a ton of energy the process takes around half a millennium to play out most of the time which is kind of hard to fathom and that's because a single proton will typically smash into Helion and then decay immediately again that disrupts the process between two helium atoms and their way more protons inside the Sun there are Helion or helium atoms so then helium 4 will go on to fuse with other smaller nuclei to form heavier elements like beryllium carbon and oxygen but when temperatures are much hotter method 2 becomes rather common it involves a collision of one helium-3 nucleus that's Helion and one helium four nucleus forming beryllium 7 beryllium 7 is interesting because it appears stable on paper they're the same number of electrons as there are protons but the proximities of its four protons result in something called electron capture in which case an inner shell or free-roaming electron especially in the case of plasma in the Sun is absorbed into the nucleus releasing a neutrino and accompanying energy the resulting nucleus is thus comprised of four neutrons and three protons transforming beryllium 7 into lithium 7 which is significantly more stable now a free-roaming proton which there are plenty of inside the Sun may collide with a lithium nucleus to produce beryllium once again in a process called lithium burning only this time with an extra Neutron tucked into the nucleus beryllium 8 that resultant is extremely unstable and almost immediately decays into two helium-4 nuclei coincidentally and there we go we ended at the same place as method 1 only with twice as much helium as the former by the way I wrote this script at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday so you'll have to excuse the more particular details I've glossed over and this is a 5 or so minutes after all so please be gentle with me thanks for the curiosity thanks for watching and thanks for learning with us