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Sci Tech
Sun is mostly iron, not hydrogen
FOR YEARS, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper to presented at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Washington, D.C., Oliver Manuel says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element.
Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at the University of Missouri-Rolla, claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen, the lightest of all elements, moves to the sun's surface.
The solar system was born catastrophically out of a supernova — a theory that goes against the widely-held belief among astrophysicists that the sun and planets were formed 4.5 billion years ago in a relatively ambiguous cloud of interstellar dust. Iron and the heavy element, xenon, are Manuel's efforts to change the way people think about the solar system's origins. Most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova that continues to generate energy within the iron-rich interior of the sun.
Manuel believes a supernova rocked our area of the Milky Way galaxy some five billion years ago, giving birth to all the heavenly bodies that populate the solar system. Analyses of meteorites reveal that all primordial helium is accompanied by `strange xenon,' he says, adding that helium and strange xenon came from the outer layer of the supernova that created the solar system. Helium and strange xenon are also seen together in Jupiter.
Data from NASA's Galileo probe of Jupiter's helium-rich atmosphere in 1996 reveals traces of strange xenon gases — solid evidence against the conventional model of the solar system's creation, Manuel says.
Manuel first began to develop the iron-rich sun theory in 1972. That year, Manual and his colleagues had earlier reported in Nature that the xenon found in primitive meteorites was a mixture of strange and normal xenon.
The strange xenon is enriched in isotopes that are made when a supernova explodes and could not be produced within meteorites.
Later they found that all of the primordial helium in meteorites is trapped in the same sites that trapped strange xenon. Based on these findings, they concluded that the solar system formed directly from the debris of a single supernova, and the sun formed on the supernova's collapsed core.
Giant planets like Jupiter grew from material in the outer part of the supernova, while Earth and the inner planets formed out of material from the supernova's interior.
This is why the outer planets consist mostly of hydrogen, helium and other light elements, and the inner planets are made of heavier elements like iron, sulphur and silicon, Manuel says. Strange xenon came from the helium-rich outer layers of the supernova, while normal xenon came from its interior. There was no helium in the interior because nuclear fusion reactions there changed the helium into the heavier elements, Manuel says.
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