Skip to main content

Over the course of time the Sun's spectral analysis will gave a stronger Helium and weaker Hydrogen reading. Explain why this will happen.

mattbrady's answer is correct.

The Sun is a yellow main-sequence star near the middle of its life, so it is currently in the process of converting hydrogen into helium by fusion. In several billion years it will run out of hydrogen; when that happens, it will expand dramatically into a red giant (most likely engulfing all the inner planets, including Earth), and begin to fuse helium into carbon.

Well before that, however, the Sun will partially deplete its hydrogen reserves. If astronomers took precise enough spectral measurements over a long enough period of time (unlikely, but impossible---if we can measure gravity waves, we might just be able to do this), they would observe very subtle changes in which the quantity of hydrogen detected slightly decreased and the quantity of helium detected slightly increased. Within a human lifetime or even the lifetime of a civilization, this effect would be very small---about one one-millionth of the Sun's total hydrogen has been used up from the time when humans invented agriculture to today. But we might just be able to pick it up if our instruments were sensitive enough.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

Is 'efficate' a word in English?

I routinely hear the word "efficate" being used. For example, "The most powerful way to efficate a change in the system is to participate." I do not find entries for this word in common English dictionaries, but I do not have an unabridged dictionary. I have checked the OED (I'm not sure if it is considered unabridged), and it has no entry for "efficate". It does have an entry for "efficiate", which is used in the same way. Wordnik has an entry for "efficate" with over 1800 hits, thus providing some evidence for the frequency of use. I personally like the word and find the meaning very clear and obvious when others use it. If it's not currently an "officially documented" word, perhaps its continued use will result in it being better documented.