Thursday, March 28Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

Tag: elements

There’s something wrong with the Sun!
Science & Technology

There’s something wrong with the Sun!

Something is wrong with the Sun! It seems that the Sun has lost 1500 times the mass of the Earth, and no one quite knows why! There is a hole in our knowledge of the Sun, and we don’t know what fills it. This is an important problem not just because the Sun is the source of our heat, and ultimately life on Earth, but it is in fact what we base most of our understanding of stars on. If we have the Sun wrong, then we’ve probably got every other star in the night sky wrong too! It is thought that our Sun is mainly comprised of light elements such as hydrogen and helium, which are the source of our star’s nuclear fusion (the bringing together of two light nuclei to make heavy nuclei). However, along with these two light elements are some heavier elements such as carbon, nitrogen and iron, w...