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“Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are?” For years people have wondered about the biggest star in sight, the enormous ball of fire that provides the earth with most of its heat and energy, the sun.

In a public lecture, Professor Raju Raghavan of the Virginia Tech physics department  attempted to explain how the sun does actually shine. He started the lecture by providing a historical overview of the sun, including slides of ancient temples dedicated to the sun such as the Temple of Rameses. He explained that many leaders, called the sun kings, invoked the sun’s authority for their own authority.

“Actual scientific evidence (about the sun) came only 150 years ago,” Raghavan said.

He continued, “According to Darwin the age of the sun is 300 million years old by erosion rates of the weald long enough for evolution. William Thomson Lord Kelvin of Gravitational energy strongly attacked Darwin, saying the sun is only 30 million years old.”

Raghavan said the secret of the sun’s energy is when two protons fuse the process and releases 25 million volts of energy. This is at least 25 million times the energy released mass-wise in chemical fuels or any other terrestrial source.

“It is a very complicated reaction of what goes on in the center of stars. This reaction is driven by the weak force of nature and goes at a very slow rate. It acts like a thermostat for the sun and makes it shine slowly for five billion years,” Raghavan said.

The only way to verify this theory is to go into the solar core and confirm the presence of the nuclear solar furnace, and the only way to see what’s going on at the center of the sun is by neutrinos. Raghavan said Fred Reines, winner of the 1995 Noble Prize in physics, showed that a neutrino is a huge hydrogen bomb in the sun.

According to a physics department pamphlet given at the lecture, a series of experiments and ideas in the early 1900s turned this speculation of how the sun shines into a scientific crisis. This breakthrough came from Einstein’s theory of the equivalence of mass and energy and the development of quantum mechanics in 1925.
But the answer came a long decade later with the birth of nuclear physics.

The only way to determine whether this idea is really correct is to look into the core of the sun and verify the presence of the thermonuclear furnace there. The same fusion reactions that power the sun also release neutrinos that interact so weakly with matter that they can escape the huge mass of the sun, according to the physics department pamphlet.

Many questions still arise over the existence of the sun and how it shines. New solar neutrino experiments are being developed at Virginia Tech to answer these questions.

Raghavan and other members of the Virginia Tech faculty are involved in the BOREXINO solar neutrino experiment under construction in the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory in Italy. According to the physics department pamphlet, the group is developing forthcoming LENS experiment that will be hopefully installed in the underground laboratory under construction.