Abstract submitted to RAS NAM 26
The textbook models of the sun and its formation were hypothesised at the turn of the twentieth century and were based on very little data and some unverifiable assumptions.
The Pauli Exclusion principle and electron degeneracy, mean that a collapsing cloud could not do so while remaining hot at its centre. Recent measurements of coronal temperatures lack the outwards temperature decline associated with the plasma ball model.
Various attempts have been made to mitigate these incompatibilities, but tend to clash with other physical principles, such as energy conservation. While Pauli’s principle has been recognised it has been misapplied. Another problem is applying the behaviour of contained gases to atmospheric gases. Also the solar spectrum is regarded as that of a black body, but none of the 50 brightest stars shares a similar spectrographic profile. Either the sun is unique, in this respect, or the similarity of its spectrograph to Planck’s distribution is coincidental.
These endeavours are all due to cognitive dissonance relating to an apparent need to preserve the Jeans/Eddington models. The universe is too vast and too complex to support any belief that any physical theory is incapable of improvement. Gravity being one such example.
This talk starts afresh with recent measurements and applies modern physical principles to this evidence, while explaining some misinterpretations, to build a new solar model and deduce its formation process.
According to the data, the coldest region of the sun is just beneath the photosphere and is a cold, solid shell that separates the interior from the corona. The shell is fully opaque to visible light, but permeable by gamma radiation. The p-p process begins on the inner surface of the shell, with hydrogen fusion into deuterium, followed immediately by electron-positron self-annihilation, which is responsible for the gamma radiation. This gamma traverses the shell and is evidenced by radiation pressure, being the difference between the calculated thermal and barometric pressures. Further evidence is visible in the solar spectrograph, which shows the presence of Compton scattering, by which the corona is heated.
The structure described above can only have formed from a cold solid sphere, which was formed due to collapse under gravity while losing heat through diffusion caused by the increasing central pressure. The second law of thermodynamics makes more sense if described as follows. “Within a bounded region, energy density tends to equalize throughout the region.” This sits well with Pascal’s principle.
Fusion was initiated at the centre of the sphere, when sufficient mass had accumulated to enable gravitational pressure to overcome the Coulomb barrier. Thenceforward, fusion burnt outwards, forming the shell that exists today. Radiative output varies as the radius of the inner shell and , therefore, with time. There is no mass/luminosity relationship.
