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Underground Experiment Confirms Fusion Powers the Sun
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have long believed that the power of the sun comes largely from the fusion of protons into helium, but now they can finally prove it (abstract). An international team of researchers using a detector buried deep below the mountains of central Italy has detected neutrinos—ghostly particles that interact only very reluctantly with matter—streaming from the heart of the sun. Other solar neutrinos have been detected before, but these particular ones come from the key proton-proton fusion reaction that is the first part of a chain of reactions that provides 99% of the sun's power.
Nothing has been proven. Scientists have long had a theory about how the Sun powers itself. That theory can be used to make predictions, such as the type of neutrinos that we should expect to see emanating from the Sun. An experiment was devised to test such a prediction, the hypothesis being that this type of neutrinos is being produced and thus will be detected. Having performed the experiment, we see that the results match what we expected, validating the hypothesis. This is important and significant, and it provides further evidence suggesting the widely accepted theory is accurate, but it does not -- nor can it -- constitute a proof.
The other interesting result would be if the expected neutrino type was not detected by this experiment, invalidating the hypothesis. This would raise further questions such as: is there some other mechanism powering the Sun? Is there something deficient in our understanding of neutrinos that prevented us from detecting them despite them being there? Was there an error in the test setup (i.e. is it repeatable by other parties)?
It has been known since the 1960's that the Sun produces energy from fusion, but the actual neutrino's observed then (and until now) were high energy electron neutrinos that actually came from relatively unimportant fusion chains (from the standpoint of energy production), not the proton-proton chain though to produce most of the Sun's energy. Since there was a "neutrino problem" (the Sun appeared to produce only 1/3 of the neutrinos predicted by theory), some people did think that for whatever reason the main energy source - the proton–proton chain reaction - was for some reason mostly shut down, presumably as part of some long period oscillation in the Sun's deep interior (although Arthur C Clarke wrote a novel, "The Songs of Distant Earth," in which it was a permanent shutdown of the Sun's fusion, and a prelude to our Sun going supernova). At that time, the inability to directly see the pp chain seemed like a big deal, but since the discovery of neutrino oscillations (which nicely explain the factor of 1/3), and also with solar interior modeling from helioseismology, there has been a pretty solid consensus that the pp chain was running the Sun, even if there was no direct observation of it.
Now it has been proved. In 1990 that would have been a big deal, but now it is more a matter of just being satisfyingly complete in our observations of the Sun.
it caught me by surprise as well. but thinking about it more it's mind blowing to think that there are a lot of things we take as fact when they may just be assertions. like fusion powering the sun, for example. I call this the Wikipedia phallacy.
I think (hope) you mean "fallacy"...
No, he has it right. By analogy with "democracy", "oligarchy", "anarchy", and so forth, naturally Wikipedia is a "phallacy" since it's quite well established that many of the editors there who run the place are pricks.