"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" - Benjamin Disraeli (quoted by Mark Twain)
"Do the math!" - Sega 16-bit video game-set commercial, c. mid-1980's
Table of Contents
- Abstract
- Caveats and Notes
- Introduction
- The Claim
- Let's Do the Math!
- A Brief Informal History
- Other Instances of the Claim
- More Details
- How does the Sun shine?
- Why do you talk specifically about hydrogen fusion? Are there other kinds? If so, then why exclude them?
- Your analysis of Hovind's rate may be well and good for that particular rate, but what about other rates?
- Where does Hovind's "5 million tons every second" figure come from?
or stated more generally:
However are we supposed to know how much mass the sun loses every second?- But if the rate were greater in the past, couldn't that provide the ginormous amount of mass loss this claim requires?
- How can we assume a constant rate of mass loss?
- Aren't there any other ways for the sun to lose mass?
- Exactly how would changing the mass of the sun affect its size?
The original claim was THE SUN IS SHRINKING, Dr. Russell Akridge, IMPACT No. 82, Institute for Creation Research, April 1980.
In it, Dr. Akridge claimed that the sun's diameter was found to be shrinking 5 feet per hour.
He attributed that "shrinkage" to the sun still being in its contraction stage,
which would mean that part or all of its energy output would be from
the Kelvin‐Helmholtz mechanism in which
the potential energy of the gasses involved in gravitational collapse is released as heat.
However, the claim appears to have quickly dropped the Kelvin‐Helmholtz mechanism (probably because they couldn't understand it themselves) and replaced it with the sun shrinking because it's losing its mass through fusion.
Kent Hovind's solar-mass-loss claim was the first that I encountered before realizing how much it had already been incorporated in the "shrinking sun" claim, so I treated it as a separate claim.
His version of the claim is also one of the few that gives any kind of rate of mass loss even though he completely resorts to hand-waving about his conclusions about the consequences.
He made the claim that, given the rate at which the sun is losing mass by "burning its fuel", then if we extrapolate back by the accepted age of the solar system then the sun's mass and gravity would have been so immensely great that it would have "suck[ed] the earth in and destroy[ed] everything".
Therefore the sun and the solar system and the earth must be much younger, like about 10,000 years old.
The rate of mass loss that Hovind provided, 5 million tons per second, is very close to correct, as is the accepted age of the solar system that he provided, 5 billion years (5×109) -- both slightly exaggerated, but not unreasonably so.
However, he never applies that rate to that time to obtain the total amount of mass lost over that time.
Instead, he just leaves that up to his audience's imagination and thus misleads and deceives them.
When we do what Hovind would not do -- i.e, actually do the math -- , we find that the total mass lost in 5 billion years is insignificant compared to the sun's total mass, a few hundredths of one percent.
When we add that total mass loss back to the sun to obtain its original mass, the change is almost imperceptible: virtually no change in its size and insignificantly greater gravity which
would have been "sucked [the earth] in" by far less than 100,000 miles.
In short, not even vaguely close to any of the dire consequences that Hovind cites.
Kent Hovind's claim is not even remotely true.
Discussion of this subject can raise many questions which I have tried to anticipate and respond to in the section,
More Details.
Basically, the short answers are:
However, as the core accumulates more helium, it is becoming increasingly hotter, which has the effect of speeding up the fusion reaction and hence the rate of mass loss.
That would mean that the sun is currently losing mass at the greatest rate so far and that the rate in the past had been less, resulting in an even smaller resultant total mass lost.
By assuming the current highest rate over the entire 4.5 billion years (5 billion according to Hovind), we are taking an upper bound on total mass loss, such that our calculated total mass loss is greater than the actual mass loss.
Please note that our examination of the consequences of mass loss is therefore based on too great of a mass loss, which still isn't vaguely enough to support Hovind's claim.
As a result, in many places I will mention and briefly discuss the "shrinking sun" as if the issue of mass loss were an aberrant addition to the claim.
That may cause my page to appear to conflict slightly with what I wrote in the abstract.
I apologize for the confusion.
Notes:
I have written a web page on the subject.
The bottom line here is that if I use a number name like "billion" (which I do a lot on this page), then you might not know what value I'm talking about (eg, if you're from a country that uses the long scale).
I use the US System (short scale).
Hence, on all my pages, including this one, "billion" means 109, a thousand millions.
Furthermore, I have sought to accompany "billion" with a note, "(109)", wherever I can in order to remove any ambiguity.
If you are interested in Names of large numbers, then follow that link to the Wikipedia article of the same name. It is an interesting topic on its own.
Share and enjoy!
Hovind uses the term "tons" without ever specifying which ton he was talking about.
Unfortunately, astronomy resources also simply use the term "tons" without explicitly identifying which kind they're using.
Using metric tons would make the most sense, since we're talking about mass instead of weight -- weight (eg, in pounds) is the force that gravity exerts on a given mass, whereas mass (eg, in kilograms) is a property of matter that measures the same regardless of gravity.
Hovind has revealed himself to be opposed to the metric system, so at first I thought that he was using long tons.
But then I realized that he had gotten his rate of mass loss out of a book which did not explicitly identify which kind of tons it was using, so he was most likely using the metric ton without realizing it.
After a slight false start, I settled on choosing to use the metric ton, also called a "tonne".
In preparing this page, I have gone through and redone all measurements of mass and calculations involving mass to be in metric tons.
Wanting to be clear, I tried to use the term, "tonne", exclusively, only using "ton" when quoting a source or commenting on that quote.
Hopefully, I was able to keep it all straight.
Thank you for your understanding and for your patience.
Footnote [1]:
Basically, I had wandered off onto a tangent and rant about the metric system (which I prefer).
This subject would be much better served by its own page, which I am in the process of writing.
On that page I plan to briefly review the systems and their history, but my main concern will be discussing the problems, both real and perceived, with converting the USA to the metric system.
As for the Disraeli quote, in my statistical analysis class we learned that a statistic is a single data point, a raw value apart from other data points, devoid of any intrinsic meaning outside of the context of that of which it is a measurement and its relationship to the other measurements.
Statistical analysis then works with a collection of statistics to determine the actual context and significance of the data.
Lying with statistics is often practiced by presenting single data points out of their context in order to mislead the audience with an impressive-sounding number or percentage while keeping them ignorant of its true significance or lack thereof.
The claim in question here alludes to incredibly large numbers which are truly astronomical but removes them from their context in order to mislead its audience to false conclusions.
The moment we place those numbers in their proper context, the claim falls apart completely as I will demonstrate.
This version from his seminar videos is representative of the claim and provides important specifics, including the rate of mass loss:
(Hovind in his seminar tape video downloaded from his site circa 2003.
From my transcription taken from the audio of video #7, "Questions and Answers", from 37 minutes 40 seconds to 39 minutes 54 seconds)
Big numbers. Impressive sounding numbers. Astronomical numbers, quite literally.
Numbers that the human mind finds difficult to comprehend (eg, I was taught that the ancient Greek definition for infinity was any number greater than 10,000).
5 million tons lost every second is a big number, an impressive sounding figure that Hovind's audience finds nearly incomprehensible.
5 billion years is another big, impressive sounding number nearly as incomprehensible to Hovind's audience as the first.
Multiply them together and you get incredibly bigger and far more impressive sounding numbers.
Even though Hovind leaves those other numbers entirely up to the fevered imagination of his audience, thus magnifying them even more, they are no less large or impressive sounding when we actually figure them out (because we can and because we must):
OK, those are the figures we get from Hovind's claim.
Impressed? Well, don't be. What happens when we do the math, which includes examining the context?
Footnote [2]:
That astronomical (literally!) number, 7.88923×1023 tonnes of solar mass lost in 5 billion years, only appears huge in isolation, out of context.
Or when compared to the wrong things, like the earth's mass, 5.97237×1021 tonnes --
the total solar mass lost is 132 times the mass of the earth, which still sounds impressive.
But once we return it to its proper context, the total mass of the Sun, we find it to be very insignificant:
Adding that lost mass back in we get 1.98933892×1027 as the mass of the Sun 5 billion years ago, just 1.00039673 times the Sun's current mass -- a factor of 1.0 would mean no change.
Since gravity is directly proportional to mass, the Sun's gravity 5 billion years ago would have been only 1.00039673 times what it is now.
And since the size of the earth's orbit is inversely proportional to gravity, 5 billion years ago the earth's orbit would have been 0.9996 what it is now, or 92,919,038 miles.
So the more massive ancient Sun would have "sucked the earth in" by about 36,864 miles, about twice the earth's diameter, far too little to have had the dire consequences Hovind claims it would have.
Yes, I hear you start to raise your hand.
"But creationists keep pointing out how earth is at just the right distance from the sun and how finely balanced earth's orbit is, so that any closer we'd burn up and any farther away and we'd freeze."
If it were true that our distance from the sun were so tightly constrained that we couldn't change our distance from the sun by even the slightest amount, then we'd be in a lot of trouble because of what I will tell you in the next paragraph.
But how much is "too much"? There's a little something called the
circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ), more popularly "the Goldylocks Zone" within life could exist because it's not too close and it's not too far away, but rather it's "just right".
So what are the inner and outer limits of the earth's CHZ? Well, there are different estimates based on different factors.
One that I heard several years ago ranged from almost to the orbit of Venus out to just beyond the orbit of Mars.
A fairly tight estimate from 1979 places it as ranging from 0.95 AU out to 1.01 AU (1 AU = the earth's distance from the sun = 92.956 million miles).
A more recent estimate from 2013 tightens up the inner edge at 0.99 AU and loosens the outer to 1.68 AU.
The tightest inner and outer edges in those estimates is about 1% or ±929,560 miles.
That's more than 25 times greater than how much the earth would have been "sucked in" as per Hovind, so the
earth wouldn't have been too hot.
However, what we experience very single year shows that those estimates are too restrictive.
As you should already know, the earth's orbit around the sun is elliptical, which causes the earth's distance from the Sun to vary by 3 million miles, bringing it 1.5 million miles closer in towards the Sun at the same time each year and 1.5 million miles farther out from the Sun six months later.
And BTW, the earth is at perihelion, its closest to the Sun, every year around 03 January, the dead of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, so variations in the distance from the Sun has far less effect than the seasonal changes due to the tilt of the earth's axis.
And so that 36,864 mile change ends up being very insignificant compared to the changes that happens to the earth's distance from the sun every single year.
This is what happens to creationist claims when we do the math.
In his seminar videos, Hovind keeps bragging about being an expert in math and science because he taught it in high school for 15 years (actually, for 13 years in nonaccredited private Christian schools, one school which he owned),
yet he never did the math.
Nor did any of his followers who bought into this claim.
All he did was wave his hands and they believed every lie he fed them.
While creationists use gravitational contraction (see below in How does the Sun shine?) to explain that "shrinkage", Hovind tries to add in massive levels of mass loss to bolster that claim.
He fails for three reasons:
But Hovind's rate of mass loss is based on the sun being powered exclusively by fusion and not in the least bit by
gravitational contraction. If he wants part of the sun's energy to come from gravitational contraction, then that requires that less of its mass loss is from fusion, which would mean that even less mass is lost which would mean that mass loss would contribute even less to the sun's supposed shrinkage.
Hovind is trying to have it both ways, but he simply cannot.
Yet again, it is painfully obvious that Hovind not only did not do the math, but he also did not think this claim through.
As today's young'uns might say, "Epic fail!"
If all you wanted was the refutation, then you need not read any further.
If you are curious about the other versions of the claim and about how my research had proceeded, then please do continue reading.
But if you have questions or concerns about the science or want to raise objections based on the science, then you can skip ahead to the section, More Details, which comprises most of this page.
Or you could simply continue reading and get both the history and the science.
A Brief Informal History
The Beginning
It all started with a cold email, but even that was presaged by a question posted on a Yahoo creation/evolution forum I used to participate on.
A freshman college student posted a message asking some questions, but his questions were based on the assumption that
the Sun burns through combustion on its surface.
Of course, we corrected and educated him, but that got us started researching the subject;
I had known since elementary school about the fusion reaction in the Sun's core, but it always helps to review the details.
On a side note, I got into a discussion about this with a creationist who proved to be very unhelpful.
Thanks to the science films in elementary school and Wonderful World of Disney films about space (in cooperation with Dr. von Braun), I literally cannot remember a time when I didn't know at least basically how the sun shines (ie, by nuclear fusion in its core).
I raised the question with this creationist of what other people think is happening and he "replied" with sarcastic remarks about what a stinking arrogant little genius I was thinking that I'm so superior to everybody else. What?
You cannot have even the simplest discussion with people like that and sadly he was typical of so many creationists I have encountered.
Then in 2002 I received a cold email which included this claim:
I sent him a detailed response.
While it may appear to be scathing, the only thing that would make it scathing is the complete and utter falsehood of the claim.
My intention was for my response to be an exercise and demonstration in testing and verifying a claim, though I also used it as an opportunity to play with some "what would it take" thought experiments.
I also did not assume my correspondant to be the source of the claim, so I asked him directly for his source.
He was a fundamentalist Christian of high school age who had just gotten back from a retreat where one of the youth ministers had given him that claim.
It appears that a true fact had been included with the original claim, which is often done to make a claim look more "scientific". This true fact is that half the mass of the Sun is concentrated in the Sun's core, which comprises only 1.5% of the Sun's total volume, and it is only that half of the Sun's mass that will ever be involved in the fusion reaction that powers the sun and causes the mass loss (E = mc2).
So these three factors seem to have been combined to produce this howler of a bogus claim:
The thing is, though, that in researching that response via Google, I came across Hovind's claim.
First I found this item from his list in his site's article, Universe Is Not "Billions of Years" Old, which has been spammed far and wide across the Web on creationist websites -- I Google'd on Hovind's claim from his site and got 847 hits. That article has since been changed to
Evidence from Space of a Young Earth and has had Hovind's name removed from it. That claim is:
Hovind cites seven sources for this claim, all of them by young-earth creationists including his own seminar tapes,
most of them difficult to find.
Of the four sources that I could find they all covered the "diminishing diameter" part of the claim, but only Hovind's seminar tape covered the mass-loss part, leaving Hovind so far as the only source for this claim.
I quoted from Hovind's seminar tape above, but here it is again:
(Hovind in his seminar tape video downloaded from his site circa 2003.
From my transcription taken from the audio of video #7, "Questions and Answers", from 37 minutes 40 seconds to 39 minutes 54 seconds)
From a then-recent radio interview with Hovind on Southwest Radio Church (13 Sep 2002), he elaborated a bit more on the part of the claim regarding the loss of solar mass:
First I verified his numbers.
I knew already that that "20 billion years" for the accepted age of the sun is totally bogus and longer than the age of the universe, but 5 billion years is about right.
I simply chalked up that "20 billion years" as his having misspoken and ignored it from that point on.
Even if Hovind had actually meant to say "20 billion years" thinking that it was right, all that would mean was that he didn't know what he was talking about.
At any rate, this mistaken age of the sun has no bearing on the refutation of Hovind's claim, so it doesn't really matter.
I surveyed several scientific sites for the actual rates of mass loss due to fusion and most of them cited a rate of 4 million tons per second and some gave a rate of 4.2 million tons.
So Hovind's figure was higher, but not by that much.
Later in my analysis, I came to assume that it might include other ways in which the sun loses mass (eg, solar wind, which I discuss below in Aren't there any other ways for the sun to lose mass?).
As it is, he would only say that he had gotten that rate from a book but wouldn't say which book, so we have no way to determine what the orginator of that published rate had included in it.
In my analysis, I decided to use Hovind's higher rate, which still does his case no good.
Next I started doing the math, applying both the standard rate and Hovind's rate.
What I found was that even Hovind's slightly exaggerated rate produced total solar mass loss that was insignificant when taken in context, when compared to the total mass of the Sun (See above).
Then I posted my findings in that Yahoo forum I mentioned earlier and we had a lively discussion about it.
We also figured out that since in the fusion of hydrogen (AKA "hydrogen burning") only 0.7% of the mass gets converted to energy (and hence lost) while 99.3% of it remains as helium (AKA "helium ash", since it's what's left by the "hydrogen burning"), then the absolutely most solar mass that could possibly be lost through fusion is only 0.7%, though since only half of the Sun's mass could ever possibly be involved, a more reasonable upper limit on solar mass lost through fusion would be 0.35%.
Of course, only the hydrogen in the Sun could have been fused into helium, so unless the Sun had started out consisting purely of hydrogen the upper limit would be even lower; the Sun did not start out as pure hydrogen but rather about 71.1% hydrogen, so its upper limit is indeed lower, about 0.25%.
The 0.036% calculated to have already been lost is only about one-seventh of that theoretical upper limit.
One creationist took great exception to that, though most of his problem seemed to be that he couldn't understand what we meant by "helium ash", in that the helium produced by the fusion reaction would metaphorically be the "ash" from "burning" the hydrogen.
He even wrote a program to iterate through each second of 5 billion years and add up the mass lost, but it wouldn't work (it was in QuickBasic, which treated the loop iterator as floating-point so when the iterator got too big it would underflow and forever thereafter not increment).
After he refused all our attempts to help him debug it (I'm a software engineer by profession), he finally accepted my suggestion that he use nested for-loops instead of one for-loop in order to avoid the underflow problem.
Ironically, his resultant accumulated mass loss was lower than the one he had objected to in the first place,
my straight-forward application of "rate times time."
But his greatest contribution was to complain that we'd have to get more information from Kent Hovind about this claim,
though when I presented him with Hovind's email address, he refused to contact Hovind.
So a little further down the line, I went ahead and wrote to Hovind myself.
In addition to the solar-mass-loss question, my research had uncovered another troublesome question about Hovind.
Remember that freshman college student who thought that the Sun burned like a fire?
Well, I came across a couple sites that made it look like Hovind also believed the same.
On a site that was dedicated to quoting Hovind and examining his claims,
http://www.oocities.org/kenthovind/quotes/sciencei.htm,
"Quacky Quotes -- Basic Science I", there was this quote from Hovind's own "Truth Radio" show, 5 August 2003 at 37:50:
Hovind: Excellent question, Andres. I'm sorry but I don't know that I have a positive answer. [....] As far as the oxygen required, I'll have to pass on that one too and do some more study on that one. I don't know that I could prove one way or the other. I think there are different types of burning though - some do not require oxygen. Sorry about that, Andres. I'll have to do some research and check back with you on that one.
And there was a rather odd fringe site, Cutting Edge Ministries, with a page entitled:
Subtitle: We have been given the exact timetable for producing Antichrist, including the exact date he is planned to arise. We have also been given the precise occult thinking by which this timetable was produced. If God does not act to prevent the Illuminati from carrying out this Plan, Antichrist will likely arise as the Illuminati has scheduled.
Their entire argument was an "Illuminist conspiracy" to use the crashing of the Galileo probe into Jupiter to ignite that planet into a star by exploding its nuclear power reactor.
They quote a number of astronomers they contacted to find out what it would take for Jupiter to burn like a star.
Each time they got the same answer, that Jupiter is just not massive enough to get a fusion reaction going in its core.
And each time, that answer just went completely over their heads; they couldn't understand the answer ... until they asked Hovind:
I wrote to the site asking about Hovind's reply to them, but they never responded.
BTW, Galileo carried 34 pounds of plutonium, not 49.7, 17 pounds in each of two General Purpose Heat Source — Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (GPHS-RTG.
Each GPHS-RTG contained 18 pellets of plutonium oxide, which were designed to be fracture-proof in case of a launch accident or accidental re-entry.
The primary safety concern was to keep the plutonium contained in case of an accident.
There was never any risk of an atomic explosion because the matrix of the plutonium oxide kept the plutonium too diffuse to ever achieve critical mass.
For some idea of what it would take to get plutonium to explode, review the basic design of
Little Boy and of
Fat Man.
IOW, those people at Cutting Edge Ministries had absolutely no clue what they were talking about.
In late 2003, I emailed Hovind asking him about this claim. After all, since he was the only known source for the claim, he should know the answers better than anybody else.
My questions were simply these:
Compare his conduct to what he claimed that he would do.
During his absence in federal prison, his website has been completely reorganized with some of his handful of articles (he depended primarily on speaking and would write down very little) completely renamed or removed.
One, How would you answer critics who have written bad things about you?, appears to be missing but was mirrored at a site to which I just linked.
Here's an excerpt with my emphasis added:
Actual experience shows that what he claims there is simply not true.
At the beginning of the article, in the one paragraph answer to the question, he states that he only responds to a written request once.
The problem is that his single response avoids answering the question, so that when that is pointed out to him in a second correspondence he complains about having to "respond again" and still try to dodge the original question.
In August 2003, a creationist created a site, questionevolution.com,
in order to "put up some Evolution / Creation notes on the web".
At some point, he stated that these notes were from a class about 20 years prior, a fact which for some reason did not click in my brain until just recently.
He announced his new site on a forum I was participating on at the time, where he explicitly elicited comments and responses.
Indeed, on his site
If you are providing additional questions that you would like for us to post, corrections to questions already posted, or ideas for web site enhancement, please provide as much information as possible. If you have any scientific evidence or references, please provide those as well. As we continue to develop this site we hope to begin to footnote every question and the reference will be vital as we start that process.
If you have negative feedback, please let us know. We even have an entire page set up for evolutionists to have their say, and your comments will either end up there or we will reply via e-mail.
Here is the claim that especially caught my eye, in his The Solar System section:
The Sun loses 4 million tons of mass through fusion per second, and is shrinking by about 1% each century (5 feet per hour). This shrinking is responsible for a large amount of the energy that the Sun gives off.
As you can see, it is almost identical to Hovind's claim, except for citing 4 million tons per second instead of 5 million.
So in my email response explaining what was wrong with that claim, I also asked him for the source of that claim, but he had no idea, only that it was in his notes from that class.
The thing that I missed the first time was when he had acquired that claim: twenty years before 2003, namely circa 1983.
All of Hovind's presentations of the claim that I've seen postdate 2000, nearly two decades after the appearance of this instance.
For that matter, Hovind didn't start his "Creation Science Evangelism ministry" until 1989, nearly a decade after the appearance of this instance of that claim.
In fact, in 1983, Hovind was serving as assistant pastor and teacher at private Baptist schools.
All of that points to him not being the original source of this claim.
It appears to have come from another creationist around 1980, when most of other bogus creationist claims were also being concocted or at least collected into books (I wouldn't doubt that many creationist claims date back many decades, likely back to the 1920's).
Those claims keep circulating around in the creationist community like urban myths, making it nearly impossible to track them back to their originator.
Hovind is notorious for reusing those old long-refuted claims, which also makes it difficult to figure out what he's made up himself and what's from other creationists.
I've also seen a very corrupted version of this claim, that first email that started this entire investigation,
one of the consequences of their "urban myth" distribution system.
So what really amazes me about this particular claim is that there is currently only one known vector for its spread, Hovind.
I have never before seen a creationist claim die out as completely as this one had.
That makes me very curious about it and its history.
Though at this point, about all I can do is to go to libraries and browse through creationist books from around 1980.
Of course, with budget constraints now most of those libraries are not open when I'm off work.
Footnote [3]:
This is yet another sordid tale of creationist dishonesty.
This one is made all the more tragic by the fact that the creationist had naïvely started out truly believing
his claims were true, but upon learning the real truth about them he was turned to the "The Dark Side", leading him to dishonesty and deliberate lying.
Such is the corrupting influence of "creation science" on Christians' morality.
Back around 2003, a creationist created a "QuestionEvolution.com"
website in which he posted several anti-evolution "questions" that he claimed "remain unanswered by the evolutionist", such as "why are there still monkeys?"
I think that tells you everything you should need to know about him and his site.
All his "questions" were the same tired old creationist crap claims that we've seen recycled endlessly for decades.
The only thing that got me involved was that it contained the only other solar-mass-loss claim besides Hovind's.
Since he naïvely believed his "questions" to be unanswerable, on his site he explicitly asked for feedback, even negative feedback, and he explicitly promised to post it, including rebuttals.
Then he actively sought out creation/evolution forums to advertise his site and to explicitly invite everyone, especially "evolutionists", to visit it and to provide feedback.
Be careful what you wish for ... .
We came, we read, we rebutted.
He was overwhelmed by the response and didn't know how to add it to his Rebuttal page, so one of the "evolutionists"
HTML-ized the replies and posted them on his own site using the exact-same format as the QuestionEvolution.com site.
True to his word, the creationist then posted a link to those rebuttals.
Then several months later he abruptly removed that link without notifying anybody.
His excuse was that he was too busy and unqualified to verify the rebuttals, so he didn't want them on his site --
of course, the fact that he was too busy and unqualified to verify his own claims has never stopped him from keeping them on his site.
When I pointed out that he knew for a fact that the statements on his home page (ie, "The questions found on this site remain unanswered by the evolutionist", "We even have an entire page set up for evolutionists to have their say, and your comments will either end up there or we will reply via e-mail.") were not true, he replied that it was his site so he'll post whatever he wants to.
That does not change the fact that he is knowingly posting statements that he knows to be false and hence is deliberately lying.
Since then, the ISP for the rebuttal pages has gone out of business, but they have been archived and are available at
http://www.geocities.ws/chastity403/questionevolution/index.html.
The QuestionEvolution.com site is still at
http://www.questionevolution.com/, but its appearance has been redone, though those same deliberate lies are still there.
Such are the wages of "creation science."
Other Instances of the Claim
So far, with one single exception, my only sources of this claim are Kent Hovind and the websites who copy Hovind's claims.
And we will never know whether Hovind had concocted this claim all by himself or simply copied it from another creationist as he normally does, because he refuses to say.
That single exception is described immediately above in the sub-section, This Claim is Apparently Older than We Thought.
The owner of QuestionEvolution.com created the site in 2003 in order to post lists of creationist claims from his notes from a class he had attended about 20 years prior, hence circa 1980.
Again, from his site:
The Sun loses 4 million tons of mass through fusion per second, and is shrinking by about 1% each century (5 feet per hour). This shrinking is responsible for a large amount of the energy that the Sun gives off.
While that claim is clearly based on the "shrinking sun" claim which originated in April 1980, it also includes mass loss due to fusion as a contributing factor.
As such, it is the earliest instance of a solar-mass-loss claim that I have found.
It is also a great rarity among creationist claims in that it was apparently quickly dropped and not used again for two decades when Hovind started using it again.
We could argue for there being a second exception, a second source for this claim outside of Hovind, but that might be stretching it.
Recall that my initial research which led me to Hovind's claim was because of a cold email from a young creationist who asked me about this claim (see the beginning of the previous section):
So allow me to make a simple request of you:
With your help, we can add more information to this last section.
Thank you.
Sean's source was a NASA educational page, "Ask Us: Sun" at https://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sun.html. Out of 73 answers to 73 questions, he lifted out of context just one (and only quoted the answer):
Dr. Louis Barbier
But Sean did not know that, so he ignored the 596 million tons of helium being produced per second and assumed that the consumption of 600 million tons of hydrogen every second resulted in the sun losing 600 million tons of mass per second instead of the mere 4 million tons that it actually loses.
As a result, his claim is completely and utterly false and using it to advance and support his religion only serves to discredit his religion.
There is absolutely no doubt that he would not want to discredit his religion, but that is what he is doing and he refuses to listen to anyone who tries to warn him against his self-defeating actions.
As I said above, he does not know how to write and as a result his pages are a shambles.
If he had ever enrolled in an English composition class and managed to actually attend class and stay awake, the first thing he should have learned about writing an essay is that the introduction (eg, the first paragraph) must contain his
thesis statement, a concise summary of the main point or claim of the essay, research paper, etc.
The second thing that he would have learned is that the rest of the essay, paper, etc, then develops, supports, and explains that thesis statement by means of examples and evidence.
In short, in order to communicate effectively with our readers, we need to tell them clearly what we are trying to say and then support what we are saying.
Sean O'Rourke does neither, because he does not know those very basic things about writing.
For example, he appears to want to support the "shrinking sun" claim (a nearly 40-year-old claim that still persists despite having been soundly refuted immediately around 1980), yet he does not come right out and say that.
He offers absolutely no statement as to whether he agrees or disagrees with that claim, but rather goes about haphazardly referencing and quoting from several sources (often just with bare links), all but one of which refute the "shrinking sun claim" -- the only pro-claim source is the Akridge's original 1980 ICR Impact essay that created the claim.
There is nothing but utter confusion over what Sean O'Rourke is trying to say.
I'm not trying to tear him down, but rather I am pointing out that Sean O'Rourke really needs help!
Help with his website -- I'm not going to even begin to discuss any possible need for spiritual or social skills help, but would rather leave that to others.
Help which I cannot offer for multiple reasons (one being that I do not agree with him, but the main one being that he has cut off all communication with the outside).
If you know Sean O'Rourke and you know how to contact him, then do please advise him to partner up with somebody who knows something about writing and something about science (someone who can explain to him what a source is actually saying).
At the very least, he needs somebody who can proof-read his pages and give him valuable feedback about what makes sense, what doesn't, and what is just complete and utter confusion.
But even more important is that it must be somebody to whom Sean would be willing to listen.
Everybody who writes thinks that they have expressed their ideas clearly even when they haven't, so everybody needs that extra set of eyes to proof-read everything.
I know that to be true, because it has happened even to me far too many times.
ADDENDUM
On his page, Sean O'Rourke tries to apply his expertise as a "master mechanic" (by which I assume he means an automobile mechanic) to present an analogy which turns out to be false.
Here is an excerpt from my email to him that address:
First, I assume that you are aware of what jargon is and how and why it is used. Basically, it's a set of terminology that those within a profession or discipline use to communicate with each other. While outsiders object to the use of jargon because it excludes them from the conversation, it is absolutely essential for rapid and precise communication with others in your profession. Jargon uses many common words but redefines them and it draws on and depends upon a background of shared knowledge and experience. As a mechanic, you routinely use many terms that only another mechanic would understand; the same is true for me as a software engineer and a military veteran (which specializes further according to branch).
Using the jargon of one's profession is automatic and it is easy to forget or not realize how outsiders might misunderstand what you're saying. I should point out here a common quote-mining technique used by creationists, which is to quote a scientist using jargon and reinterpreting that jargon into street English, thus changing and misrespresenting what that scientist had actually said. That technique has been called "semantic shifting" and may be performed deliberately or else be the result of the creationist simply not understanding what was being said.
Dr. Louis Barbier's use of the term "consume" comes from chemistry in which all the atoms in all the molecules going into a reaction are accounted for in the products of that reaction, each and every atom. IOW, all the matter and energy going in (and thus being consumed) must equal all the matter and energy coming out.
Applying that to your own example:
The Sun is no different. Even though the reaction is not chemical but rather nuclear, the same principle applies that the matter and energy being consumed have to be present and accounted for in the reaction products, including any matter that was converted to energy or vice versa. In the case of "hydrogen burning", four hydrogen nuclei fuse to form one helium nucleus, a few particles (including two neutrinos), and some gamma radiation. A helium nucleus has less mass than four hydrogen nuclei do, so the missing mass is accounted for as having been converted into energy.
Dr. Louis Barbier assumed that his audience would have such basic knowledge and would understand what he meant by "consume". I would agree that he should have made his statement more clear.
But another aspect of this is that the sun is powered by "hydrogen burning", which is to say by the fusion of hydrogen into helium, the end result of which is that the hydrogen being fused no longer exists as hydrogen.
So with about 600 million tons of hydrogen being consumed each second in order to produce 596 million tons of helium, we could indeed try to make a case for there being a point where we eventually run out of hydrogen.
So then, let's look at that.
Going back to the gas tank analogy, if you have two vehicles burning gas at the same rate but one has a 40-gallon tank while the other has a 2-gallon tank, then obviously the one with the 40-gallon tank should run much farther, about 20 times more I would guess.
Sound reasonable? I think so too.
So then we need to look at how much hydrogen there is in the sun for it to burn and how long that would take at the consumption rate of 600 million tons of hydrogen per second.
The total mass of the sun is 1.98855×1027 tonnes.
Hydrogen accounts for about 73.46% of that mass, so the sun contains 1.46078883×1027 tonnes of hydrogen.
Since only the hydrogen within the core can be burned, since that is where the fusion reaction occurs, and the core contains half the sun's mass, only half of that total hydrogen can serve as fuel, which would amount to 7.30394415×1026 tonnes of hydrogen.
So then, since Sean wants us to do the math and since actually doing the math is precisely what this entire page is about, let's do the math!
Solve for time: t = d / r
On his same page, I notice that Sean O'Rourke idolizes that convicted fraud, Kent Hovind.
You who are reading this page know that I wrote it in response to Kent Hovind's false solar-mass-loss claims in which Hovind had failed to do the math and actually refused to do the math, whereas I did do the math which completely refutes his claim.
Now we have Sean O'Rourke telling us to do the math even though he had obviously never done the math himself.
When will creationists ever learn this one simple lesson: If you tell someone to do the math, then you damned well better have done the math yourself.
Otherwise, you only end up exposing yourself as a fraud or a fool, or both.
Solve for time: t = d / r
Now, if he had attempted to do the math, I would really like to see his calculations.
Of course, since he has isolated himself from the world and from reality, we'll never know.
I repeat my plea: If you know Sean O'Rourke and how to contact him, then please do so and try to help him out on this.
And Sean, if you ever find this page, we really need to talk.
Here's the list I have so far:
If you have one that I don't mention, then please ask it through my "Contact me" link.
I apologize for this really basic question, but over the years I've had to learn the hard way that many people simply don't have some of the most basic scientific knowledge that I have taken for granted almost all my life.
Therefore, I offer this section to ensure that we will be talking about the same thing in later sections.
This question has been pondered for much of human history.
I discuss here three major explanations with an eye to how each one could cause the loss of mass.
This is worth mentioning because it seems to still be a point of confusion for much of the general public, especially among the scientifically illiterate.
On a forum in October 2002, I witnessed a young college student insisting on the witness of his eyes that the surface of the sun is obviously burning like a fire and so some of its mass is being "burned up" on the surface and
several things I have seen from Kent Hovind makes me suspect that he also believes the sun "burns" like a fire.
Besides the misidentification of the incandescent solar surface as a "burning fire", the common misconceptions that student (and possibly Kent Hovind too) displayed are:
So when Hovind says that the sun is burning and that huge amounts of mass are being lost, most of his audience
don't know enough to ask the pertinent question, "Where did that mass go?", and so they easily assume and accept the idea that most of the sun's mass just simply ceased to exist, which they "know" would happen in a fire --
they don't know any better, so they are easy to deceive.
I suspect that even "science expert" Hovind thinks this is how the sun burns.
I base this suspicion on the wording of his claims ("The sun is burning,(that's obvious to all) ... ")
and on his reply about an "Illuminati conspiracy" to turn Jupiter into a second star by crashing the
Galileo probe into Jupiter (2003 Sep 21) and exploding its plutonium reactor (Cutting Edge Ministries -- see more complete discussion below):
It should be obvious that this method involves absolutely no loss of mass.
As it turns out, this energy source is real and it is responsible for raising the temperature of a
protostar's core to the point where hydrogen fusion can begin.
It is also what keeps the core hot enough to sustain the fusion reaction and even regulate it by establishing a hydrostatic equilibrium between gravitational contraction pressing inwards, heating up the core, and expansion outwards from thermal energy, cooling the core -- the fusion reaction of "hydrogen burning" is very sensitive to changes in temperature.
Therefore, while gravitational contraction does contribute to sunshine, it does so only indirectly by enabling and sustaining the sun's fusion reaction, the real source of the sun's energy output.
When the sun was forming, it got its energy from gravitational contraction.
Then once the core heated up enough for nuclear fusion to start, radiative pressure from the fusion reaction slowed down and finally halted the gravitational contraction, placing the sun in hydrostatic equilibrium.
Of course, all this happened before the sun became a main-sequence star, long before the earth could have been habitable.
At present, the source of the sun's energy is the nuclear fusion reaction in its core.
Then when the hydrogen has effectively been used up in the core, the nuclear fusion reaction will slow down and gravitational contraction will predominate again.
That will then drive the temperature of the core up to where it can start to "burn the helium" (ie, fuse the helium into carbon through the triple-alpha process) and start the sun's red giant phase in which the sun will no longer be a main-sequence star.
And the incandescence of the sun's surface helps to contribute to another form of mass loss from the sun's surface: solar wind. Though it turns out that this loss is small compared to the loss through nuclear fusion and doesn't contribute significantly to the sun's loss of mass
(see below).
So to recapitulate the mass-loss effects of these three ideas for how the sun shines:
Footnote [4]:
I last had chemistry in high school, where this idea never came up and where we worked with the strict accounting of every single atom involved in a chemical reaction, among other topics.
Therefore, I believe that this is a more advanced topic that is covered in university-level chemistry and I have no reason to doubt it.
However, it is of no practical importance in this topic, since the mass of a chemical bond would be miniscule compared to that of the nuclei of the atoms being bound (the vast majority of an atom's mass is contained in its nucleus).
An interesting experiment would be to repeat the calculations in the next section ("Where does that "5 million tons every second" figure come from?") using the amount of energy released by burning a given amount of fuel;
i.e., is there a corollation between calories and E = mc2?
So this is an interesting fact to know, but it does not detract in any practical way from the original statement that no mass is lost in a fire.
Yes, there are indeed other kinds of thermonuclear fusion reactions which fuse elements other than hydrogen.
But they don't come into play here because they only occur towards the end of a star's life-time, which for the sun won't be for another 5 billion years.
To put it simply, fusion reactions require a lot of energy, which in a star's case is the high pressure and temperature at its core.
Another fact of life is that the heavier an element is (ie, the more protons and neutrons its nucleus contains), the more energy it requires in order to fuse into an even heavier element, which means that the core has to be even hotter.
But because of hydrodynamic equilibrium which regulates the core's temperature,
as long as a lighter element's fusion reaction is in progress, that will keep the core from getting hot enough for a heavier element to start to fuse.
But when the lighter element is depleted, then the star will start to collapse, which will apply greater pressure on the core and heat it up enough to start the next heavier element to start to fuse, and so on.
As I said above about how the lighter elements being depleted which start the fusion reactions of the heavier elements, that only happens towards the end of a star's lifetime, when it has departed the Main Sequence.
While a star is on the Main Sequence, the only fusion reaction is hydrogen fusing into helium.
Our sun is currently in the middle of its time on the Main Sequence.
All discussion how much mass the sun would have lost through fusion involves hydrogen fusion and no other kind of fusion.
Any other kind of fusion would have absolutely no bearing on our sun for another 5 billion years.
If you don't understand why all that is, or what the Main Sequence is, then continue reading.
This question pertains to stellar evolution (which is of course very different from biological evolution, so don't fall for that old creationist switcheroo meant to confuse you).
The word "evolution" dates back to around 1600, where it was used to describe a sequence of stages of development,
and "turning out" or unfolding, as the basis of the word means.
Thus you can use it to describe the sequence in which something like a star or a river will develope.
Biological evolution only came along two centuries later.
Basically, there are certain stages of development that a star (such as our sun) will go through and each stage of development is marked by certain characteristics, which I will describe below as briefly as I can.
The primary goal here is to identify those stages of development with an eye on what is powering the star in each stage.
The important point here will be that while there are several kinds of fusion that can occur within a star, most of them happen only after the star leaves the Main Sequence. While the star is on the Main Sequence then it only uses hydrogen fusion.
Our sun is about half-way through its time on the Main Sequence, so the only form of fusion that is applicable to Hovind's claim is hydrogen fusion.
I am going to keep this very brief, doing it more as an introductory overview.
You can refer to the Wikipedia article on stellar evolution for more information.
That article will cover the entire lifetime of stars and provide links to articles dealing specifically with each stage of development; in the discussion below I will link to those more specific articles.
Much of our understanding of stellar evolution comes from the
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram which was created circa 1910.
For decades astronomers had been doing an intensive survey of the sky collecting the spectra
[5] of the light from many stars.
They noticed that those spectra exhibited certain characteristic properties which led to their classifying those
stars according to those properties, assigning almost random letters to each group (eg, A, B, F, G, K, M, O).
When they tried plotting all those stars on a scatter graph with decreasing temperature on the horizontal axis and increasing absolute magnitude (AKA "brightness" or "luminosity") on the vertical axis, interesting patterns emerged.
They found that stars of the same spectral class would not only group together on the chart, but those groups formed a downward sloping line across the graph with the hottest and brightest stars (class O) high on the left down to the coolest and dimmest stars (class M) low on the right.
That line became the Main Sequence and the order of the spectral classes turned out to be O (white), B (blue-white), A (blue), F (green), G (yellow), K (orange), M (red) ("Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me" -- our sun is a class G star).
But then there were also the odd stars that did not fit on the Main Sequence.
For example, clumped in the lower left of the graph were hot stars that were dim; these became known as
"white dwarves".
And clumped in the upper right were cool stars that were bright; these became known as
"red giants".
Later we came to recognize red giants and white dwarves to be the final stages of a star's life sequence, of its stellar evolution.
And there are others, such as the
super-giants of various colors along the top of the diagram and
brown dwarves, etc.
As our understanding grew, the picture that emerged was that a new star would start to form as a protostar out of a nebula somewhere off of the Main Sequence. As it finished forming and started to fuse hydrogen into helium in its core, it would move onto a particular point on the Main Sequence, depending on its initial properties (primarily how massive it is), and it would then stay there for most of its lifetime fusing the hydrogen in its core into helium.
Then as its supply of hydrogen ran out, it would become a red giant and leave the Main Sequence.
What would happen after that depends on how massive the star was to begin with.
There is a sequence of a number of different fusion reactions that the star could progress through, provided it is massive enough to drive its core temperature up higher and higher to make each successive reaction possible -- as soon as its mass can no longer provide the required temperature, then it will progress no further.
One scenario is for the star to start to fuse its helium core into carbon.
If it's massive enough (more massive than the sun is), then it will
"go nova" blowing off its outer layers leaving its carbon core as a white dwarf.
If it's even more massive than that, it can fuse that carbon into ever heavier elements, though iron is the limit.
Then it could end its life as a supernova leaving behind a number of possible exotic astronomical objects.
If it goes nova or supernova, then it will create a planetary nebula which can provide the material out of which the next generation of protostars can form.
A side topic that all leads to is stellar nucleosynthesis through which the elements were formed in successive generations (called "populations") of stars through the fusion of successive elements starting with hydrogen.
This idea was the source of Carl Sagan's poetic reference to everything being made out of "star stuff".
In more detail though still very greatly simplified, these are the basic stages of development a star will go through in its lifetime:
Protostars form out of GMCs, which in turn provide the protostar with its mass.
Basically, part of the GMC will become denser and through gravity start to collapse the surrounding matter into a "dense core." There are various things that can cause this to happen as discussed in the Wikipedia article on
star formation.
At first, gas pressure and magnetic pressure resist the force of gravity, but when enough mass has accumulated then the dense core starts to collapse under its own gravity as it continues to pull more mass in.
Theoretically, this collapse starts in the center and propagates outward, leading to the formation of a protoplanetary disk.
Gravitational collapse causes the center of the dense core to heat up, first disassociating the molecular hydrogen and then stripping away the atoms' electrons.
It's still not hot enough for hydrogen fusion, but deuterium fusion can start and produce helium-3 -- deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen with an extra neutron and helium-3 is an isotope of helium that's missing one neutron.
This continues to heat up the core.
Matter continues to fall into the protostar making it both more massive and hotter.
This is the stage where the
Kelvin‐Helmholtz mechanism uses gravitational collapse as the major contributer to the protostar's energy output.
In a main-sequence star such as the sun, the star's energy output (ie, radiative pressure) counters its gravitational collapse such that they balance each other in hydrostatic equilibrium wherein radiative pressure outwards stops the gravitational collapse while that gravitational collapse keeps the core hot enough to maintain the core's fusion reaction that's generating the radiative pressure outwards.
But the protostar is not at that point yet in that it does not have a powerful fusion reaction running yet, so matter continues to collapse into it, increasing its mass and its core temperature.
As the radiative pressure increases, the stellar wind starts up to push the surrounding dust away.
In practical terms, this is what now makes the new star visible.
The initial stellar wind appears to be very active as it pushes large amounts of matter away.
This is the star's T Tauri stage.
While it may appear to be expelling large amounts of matter from the star, in reality it is keeping more matter from infalling into the new star.
That matter will contribute to the proto-planetary disk and to planet formation.
At this point, the star will have acquired nearly all of its initial mass.
How much mass that is will determine what happens to the star from this point on throughout its entire lifetime.
For example, a highly-massive protostar can skip this stage altogether, moving straight to the Main Sequence.
On the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, the pre-main-sequence star moves onto the
stellar birthline, which is a set of locations found above the Main Sequence where these newly visible stars reside and from where they will migrate down onto their place on the Main Sequence.
Again, the star's mass will determine many things about its time in the Main Sequence:
The two forms of hydrogen fusion are the
proton–proton chain reaction (pp-chain) and the carbon–nitrogen–oxygen fusion reaction (CNO cycle).
Follow the links for more detailed information
Basically the proton–proton chain reaction has two hydrogen nuclei fusing to form a deuterium nucleus, which then fuses with another hydrogen nucleus to form a 3He isotope nucleus, which then fuses with another 3He nucleus to form one helium nucleus (4He) and two hydrogen nuclei.
The CNO cycle is a catalytic reaction involving carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen nuclei that are used but in the end not changed in order to fuse four hydrogen nuclei into one helium nucleus; I won't even try to describe the process here, so follow that link and read it for yourself.
The CNO cycle requires higher temperatures than the pp-chain reaction, so the CNO cycle predominates with stars more massive than 1.3 times the sun with the pp-chain reaction be more predominate in less massive stars.
The sun uses both reactions though primarily the pp-chain reaction, however, as the sun's core is slowly becoming hotter, use of the CNO cycle is increasing.
After a star enters the Main Sequence, it doesn't just stay put, but rather it starts drifting to the left.
As the hydrogen in its core fuses into helium, that helium builds up in the core.
As a result, the core becomes ever hotter slowly over time.
That causes the fusion reaction, which is very sensitive to temperature, to slowly increase, which in turn increases the star's energy output as well as its size.
Hence, the longer the star stays on the Main Sequence, the hotter and brighter it becomes, which slowly shifts it to the left and up in the Main Sequence.
Here yet again, what ends up happening depends on how massive the star is.
The fates for lower-mass stars are few, while the fates for high-mass stars are more varied as well as being the stuff of entire series of Science Channel documentaries.
Rather than engage in such a massive digression, I'll just describe basically what's going on and let you drill deeper in the side tracks that interest you.
Fusion doesn't stop with helium.
There is a series of fusion reactions which produce ever heavier elements:
But unlike in a Main Sequence star, fusion in a mature star doesn't happen only in the core.
As the core heats up enough to start fusing helium, the layer around it also heats up to where it can start to fuse hydrogen. Such a layer is called a "shell".
So as the core is burning helium, it's in a shell surrounding the core that the star is still burning hydrogen.
And in a more massive mature star that can start to fuse carbon in its core, that core will have a shell that's burning helium and then another shell that's burning hydrogen.
And a far more massive mature star could have a core that's fusing silicon into iron plus six shells, five of which have fusion reactions going and the outermost being hydrogen.
And of course, the energy output of each of those fusing shells would add to the radiative pressure that would push the star's size out even more.
So what happens when the core runs out of fuel and the star isn't massive enough to get the next fusion reaction started? In general, the shells will continue their own fusion reactions until they also run out of fuel. When all the fuel has run out, then the star will again start to contract and will continue to do so until something stops it. There are many scenarios that could play out, all of which depend on various factors but still primarily they depend very heavily on the mass of the star.
Normally, physical atomic-level limits will be reached (ie,
electron degeneracy pressure) and the much smaller mature star will start cooling down as a white dwarf.
Of course, that all assumed a graceful decline into old age, but that is not always the case.
Sometimes when a fusion reaction ignites in a shell, it causes an explosive expansion which expells upper layers from the star.
It can also cause the core to undergo far greater compression due to implosion.
Such events are called novae or
supernovae.
There are so many different scenarios and outcomes possible that I'll just let you follow through yourself.
Otherwise I'd dig us into a digression so deep that we'd never find our way out (that was not intended to be an introduction to the subject of black holes, which is yet another possible fate for a very massive star).
For our purposes, we're only interested in the fate of our sun.
It is not massive enough to become a supernova, but it should "explode" and eject its outer layers as it experiences "shell helium flashes"
("brief" and violent runaway helium fusion reactions) well into its post-retirement career as a red giant.
This section's question is "Why do you talk specifically about hydrogen fusion? Are there other kinds? If so, then why exclude them?"
The answer has just been given, since the sun is in the middle of its time on the Main Sequence, it is only using hydrogen fusion, so that is the only kind of fusion that we can consider here.
QED
Footnote [5]:
Everything we know about a star we get from its light.
We can observe where it is in the sky, which includes observing its
parallax and using trigonometry to determine how far away it is (up to a distance of about 100 light years, but the Hipparcos satellite in 1989 extended that to 1,000 and then the Hubble Space Telescope extended it to 10,000 light years out in 2014).
We can observe how bright it appears to be (apparent magnitude) and deduce how bright it actually is
(absolute magnitude).
And we can observe its spectrum.
Basically, you place a prism to the eyepiece of the telescope (a gross oversimplification of the actual mechanism)
and photograph the "rainbow" that's produced.
Now, light is a band of frequencies of
electromagnetic radiation, so each point along the
visible spectrum is a distinct frequency of light corresponding to a particular color.
Each element has a number of specific frequencies of light that it will absorb and emit, which correspond to particular quantum energy levels of its electrons.
Therefore, in each star's spectrum we find Fraunhofer lines (named after their discoverer, Joseph von Fraunhofer) which tell us what elements are present in and about that star.
Furthermore, when those lines are shifted from where they should be, either towards the blue or towards the red end of the spectrum, then that
Doppler shift tells us both whether the star is moving towards us (ie, "blue-shifted") or away from us (ie, "red-shifted") and at what velocity.
So the stellar spectra that had been collected contained a great wealth of information which went into the creation
of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram circa 1910.
Footnote [6]:
Remember your nuclear warfare training.
We were taught about dealing with three kinds of radiation named after the first three letters in the Greek alphabet:
The triple-alpha process is so-named because it involves the fusion of three alpha particles (ie, 4He nuclei) into a carbon nucleus.
That's a valid question, though another question would be how much effect changing the rate would have.
But since that would involve diffential calculus, which may lose some of my readers, I will instead present a number of rates of mass loss along with the effects that those rates would have in the table below.
First, a brief description of each rate presented in the table, which will be discussed more fully elsewhere on this page (the last two do not involve an actual rate nor span of time):
As an alternative, you could treat it as 10 million tonnes per second over 5 billion years.
In this capacity, it will be a much more blatant over-estimate, assuming that the 7-million-tonne rate wasn't enough to convince you.
Similarly, when I calculate the effects of mass loss at the end of the sun's time on the Main Sequence,
I take the estimate that we are half-way through that time and I again assume Hovind's inflated value, yielding 10 billion years (10×109) for the sun's entire time on the Main Sequence.
According to Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, the sun's gravity is directly proportional to its mass.
Therefore, the ratio of the sun's ancient gravity to the its present gravity would equal the ratio of the sun's ancient and current masses.
This importance of this ratio is two-fold. First, it refutes Hovind's claim that the ancient sun's mass would be so immensely greater that it would have "sucked the earth in".
Second, it can be used to calculate the effects of that greater gravity on the earth's orbit.
Please keep in mind that, since the earth's orbit is elliptical, the earth's distance from the varies throughout the year, being closest at one point and farthest out six months later.
Given the earth's orbital eccentricity (0.0167086), the earth's distance from the sun varies from about 1.5 million miles closer in to 1.5 million miles farther out.
That should give you some kind of context within which to evaluate the consequences of how much the earth would have actually been "sucked in" by the ancient sun's greater gravity.
As we can see:
None of Kent Hovind's dire consequences for the ancient earth have any basis in reality.
I very much want to see what his calculations were that led him to those conclusions, but he very strongly resisted all attempts to ask him.
I very strongly suspect that he had never performed any calculations, not even the most basic calculations to determine how much mass would have been lost and how that compared to the sun's total mass.
Rather, I think that even he just looked at that rate of mass lost per second, thought momentarily that there are a lot of seconds in 5 billion years, and then jumped to the conclusion he had decided upon from the beginning.
Furthermore, from his extreme evasiveness I strongly suspect that I was not the first to ask him about this claim and that he had learned from earlier contacts how bogus his claim is.
But rather than drop his claim, he chose to continue to use it and bluff his way through any questions about it.
IOW, he persisted in using a false claim that he knew to be false, which is also called "deliberate lying."
Excellent questions and not just because I asked them. When I asked Kent Hovind where he had gotten his rate from, he just replied, "Nearly any high school or college earth science book will give the sun's loss rate at about 5 million tons/sec." -- actually, I had a different reason for asking him that, which I will discuss below.
But that still begs the question of where those books had gotten that rate from.
Actually, Hovind's rate is the highest rate that I've seen given, with most of the ones I've seen quoting about 4.6 million tons.
And when we calculate it ourselves here, it will be a bit lower than that.
Believe it or not, we will use Einstein's equation that everybody knows from the titles of
The Twilight Zone: E = mc2, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
Or more specifically, we know the amount of energy and we know the speed of light, so we are able to solve for the mass that has to be converted to energy in order to account for the amount of energy we measured: m = E/(c2).
In short, we know the speed of light, so we know c, and we measure the total energy output of the Sun per second, so we know E, so we plug those two values into the equation and get the value of m, the mass that is lost per second by having been converted to energy through the process of nuclear fusion.
Now let's do that math:
Magnitude Calculation:
Units Calculation [7]:
Published rates range from 4 million tons to 5 million tons, which I would assume are metric tons.
The variation we see may be due to rounding off or to using different values for the sun's energy output per second.
It might even be due to some writers converting from tonnes to short tons, as I would expect Hovind to do, but I do not deem that likely since I cannot imagine Hovind using any degree of rigor.
In the final analysis, Hovind's rate of "5 million tons every second" is the highest that I have seen and another much older version of this claim (two decades earlier, the only other one I have seen so far) cites the rate as "4 million tons of mass through fusion per second."
As we have already seen, Hovind's use of a higher rate does not benefit his claim at all.
On further reflection, I have come to wonder whether Hovind's higher rate mightn't be a combination of two rates.
It could be possible that Hovind's source had combined a rate of 4 million tonnes lost per second through fusion and 1 million tonnes lost per second through the solar wind in order to come up with a total of 5 million tonnes lost per second.
But since Hovind refused to divulge any of his sources or to discuss his claim, we will never know.
Footnote [7]:
It turns out that one of the more important functions of constants in physics (eg, G, the
Constant of Gravitation: 6.674×10-11 m3×kg-1×s-2) is to make the units come out right.
In the case of the gravitational constant, multiplying it to two masses (in kg) and dividing by the distance (in meters) squared leaves you with kg·m·s-2, which is the definition for the Newton, a unit of force.
A very practical use for this fact is in deriving conversion factors. At my first job as a software engineer, I was the go-to guy for conversion factors even though I kept trying to teach them how to do it themselves.
Now mind you, these were exotic units (eg, binary angular measurement (BAM)) that you could not find in most reference books (nor could you find them on-line since in 1983 there was no such thing as "on-line").
Please refer to my web page, Unit Conversions for more information on this interesting subject and to acquire a useful skill.
It may seem so at first, but, no, that still could not work.
Even Hovind tried to argue for this with me in what was perhaps his only attempt to actually discuss his claim with me:
"Nearly any high school or college earth science book will give the
sun's loss rate at about 5 million tons/sec. To complicate things it
probably burned at a different (faster most likely) rate in the early
stages when it was larger. I state in my seminar that it obviously
used to have more mass and this puts a time limit on the earth sun
relationship. There are scores of factors that limit the age of the
earth to less than the billions some arbitrarily assign to it."
The problem for Hovind and this claim is that hydrogen fusion itself imposes a very real upper limit to the maximum amount of mass that could possibly be lost through hydrogen fusion regardless of how fast the reaction is: 0.7%.
The reason is because when you fuse hydrogen, it becomes helium.
The hydrogen doesn't just simply disappear, but rather it is replaced with an almost identical amount of helium.
That means that even if every single hydrogen nucleus were to be used up through fusion, almost all of that "lost" hydrogen mass would still remain in the form of the helium nuclei that were generated by that fusion reaction.
And that outcome would be exactly the same regardless of whether it had taken billions of years or it had happened instantaneously.
The rate of fusion has absolutely no effect on this effect.
Why is that? Let's do the math yet again:
Consider the end result of hydrogen fusion: four hydrogen nuclei fuse to form one helium nucleus.
We would expect that the atomic weight of a helium nucleus (its mass) would equal that of four hydrogen nuclei, but it doesn't. Instead, it is less. Some of the mass has been lost!
Take the difference between the atomic weights of four hydrogen nuclei and that of one helium nucleus and you get the amount of mass that was lost as energy (and as a couple neutrinos, but they're practically devoid of mass so they don't really count).
Doing the math:
Helium:
4H -> He
So fusing hydrogen into helium results in 0.729% (normally rounded off to 0.7%) of the original mass being lost as energy and 99.27% (normally rounded off to 99.3%) of the original mass remaining as helium (AKA "helium ash" when referring to hydrogen fusion as "burning hydrogen").
That will hold true regardless of how slowly or rapidly that fusion reaction runs.
If the fusion reaction were to run 100 billion times faster, all that you would accomplish would be to use up the hydrogen that much faster and the resultant mass loss could never be more than 0.729%.
For that matter, it could never be even that much.
That ideal maximum mass loss would require two ideal conditions, only one of which might possibly be met (but not by the sun):
The need for the first condition may not be completely clear; the creationist I presented it to was completely unable to understand it (but then he also could never understand that fusing hydrogen produces helium).
Obviously, any percentage of the star's total mass that isn't hydrogen will not experience any mass loss due to hydrogen fusion.
So if the star started out 75% hydrogen, then the most mass it could lose would be 0.7% of 75%, which is 0.525%.
If instead the star started out 100% hydrogen, then the most mass it could lose would be 0.7% of 100%, which is 0.7%.
IOW, the only way to achieve maximum mass loss would be if the star started out consisting entirely of hydrogen.
In the case of our sun, which started out 71.1% hydrogen, that figure would be an absolutely maximum mass loss of 0.5%, but it could only lose about half that at most because the second condition is impossible.
To evaluate the second condition given above, consider that a fusion reaction has certain requirements of temperature, density, and pressure.
Those requirements can only be met in the star's core, where half the star's mass is contained in only 1.5% of its volume (using our sun as the model).
Thus, at most only half the star's hydrogen can be involved in the fusion reaction, resulting in a maximum mass loss of 0.35%, assuming the unrealistic conditions that the core starts out consisting of pure hydrogen and that all the hydrogen in the core gets used up.
For stars such as the sun which did not start out as pure hydrogen, that percentage gets reduced further by the tendency for gravity to pull heavier nuclei (ie, the non-hydrogen nuclei which in the sun are mostly helium but also include very small amounts of oxygen, carbon, iron, neon, nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, and sulfer) down into the core, so the core starts out been poorer in hydrogen than the star's upper layers.
Still using the sun as an example, as a protostar it started out 71.1% hydrogen,
but now after 5 billion years its photosphere is 74.9% hydrogen, a higher concentration of hydrogen than the sun had started out with, because much of the photosphere's pre-existing heavier atoms, mainly helium, settled into the core due to gravity.
As a result, the sun's core would have started out 67.3% hydrogen and the most mass that we could expect the sun to lose through hydrogen fusion would be 0.2454%.
We just calculated that, with the sun's core, half the sun's mass, having started 67.3% hydrogen, the absolute maximum mass loss would be 0.2454%.
As calculated even earlier in "Let's Do the Math!", the sun has already lost 0.03965755% of its total mass, but it's about half-way through its estimated normal life-time (ie, before it enters its red giant phase) so we should expect a final main-sequence mass loss to be twice that or about 0.08%, which is about one-third of that maximum loss of 0.2454%.
But as more and more of the core becomes helium, it becomes more and more difficult for enough hydrogen nuclei to be in close enough proximity to each other in order to fuse.
So that 0.2454% is an ideal maximum that could never be attained.
Now, let's see what effect that 0.2454% loss would have.
Like the table in a preceding section, the following table shows what effect these two maximum mass-loss percentages would have on the sun's mass and gravity and on the size of the earth's orbit.
Unlike that previous table which used the current sun's mass and the current size of the earth's orbit as its reference point, this table's reference point is the mass of the sun and the size of the earth's orbit when the sun's fusion reaction started.
In order to arrive at values for that reference point, I am using the values arrived at in the row of the previous table representing a rate of 5 million tons per second taken over a period of 5 billion years.
In the table below, these are what the rows represent:
In short, this is the theoretical uppermost limit of the percentage of a star's mass that it could possibly lose through hydrogen fusion, which would be the only form of fusion a sun-like star would use while on the
Main Sequence.
Of course, for several more practical reasons as discussed above and below, it would be impossible for any star to actually experience this level of mass loss through fusion.
Therefore, this line is included in the table to demonstrate that anything even remotely approaching the consequences of "the sun burning its fuel" would be completely impossible and that hence Hovind's claim is absolutely bogus.
We use the same value in both rows of this table.
According to Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, the sun's gravity is directly proportional to its mass.
Therefore, the ratio of the sun's new gravity to the its original gravity would equal the ratio of the sun's new and original masses.
This ratio will be used to calculate the effects of that lesser gravity on the earth's orbit.
Please keep in mind that, since the earth's orbit is elliptical, the earth's distance from the varies throughout the year, being closest at one point and farthest out six months later.
Given the earth's orbital eccentricity (0.0167086), the earth's distance from the sun varies from about 1.5 million miles closer in to 1.5 million miles farther out.
That should give you some kind of context within which to evaluate the consequences of how much the earth would drift away from the new sun.
As we can see, even when we lose the impossible-to-actually-obtain, absolute-maximum amounts of mass loss due to fusion over the main-sequence life of the sun, the effects are still minimal and insignificant.
Keep in mind that since the sun has lost about 0.04% of its mass in half its lifetime, then its total expected loss should be twice that, or about 0.08%.
Thus that maximum possible loss of 0.245% is three times greater than what we expect to actually happen and the actual effects would be correspondingly less than those given above.
To recapitulate:
Bottom line: there are very real limits to how much mass can be lost through fusion regardless of how fast the fusion reaction is. Running that reaction faster does not buy this claim any more mass loss, at least none that could ever make any difference.
One word: hydrostatic equilibrium.
Quick review and overview:
One of the effects of this balance, this hydrostatic equilibrium, is that it regulates the rate of the fusion reaction.
Being a thermonuclear reaction, it is very sensitive to temperature -- I had seen the equations once and recall that the reaction's rate is directly proportional to the temperature raised to the fourth power (T4) -- , speeding up significantly as it gets hotter and slowing down significantly as it gets cooler.
So as gravitational collapse begins to dominate over radiative pressure, it heats up the core, which speeds up the reaction, which increases the radiative pressure, which begins to dominate over the gravitational collapse, which cools down the core, which slows down the reaction, which decreases the radiative pressure and allows the gravitational collapse to begin to dominiate, etc.
To describe that process more clearly:
Thus the rate of fusion oscillates, but it does so about a constant average rate.
In addition to gravitational contraction and radiative pressure, there is a third factor that affects the temperature of the core and hence the rate of the thermonuclear reaction: increasing amounts of helium in the core.
Of course, it is quite obvious that the amount of helium in the core would increase, since that is what the fusion reaction is producing and where.
But that accumulation of helium has the effect of making the core hotter, which in turn speeds up the thermonuclear reaction over time, causing the sun's energy output and size to slowly increase over time.
I've heard two different reasons explaining how the accumulation of helium is increasing the temperature of the core:
Whatever the reason for the gradual heating up of the core, the sun's energy output is increasing over time, which means that it is presently at its brightest.
That means that the rate at which it is presently losing mass due to fusion is the highest rate so far.
Which means that in the past the rate of mass loss due to fusion was lower.
Which means that extrapolating the current rate back over time results in an overestimation of total mass loss; the actual amount of mass lost due to fusion would actually be less.
Since the overestimated amount of mass lost has been demonstrated to be insignificant, the actual amount of mass lost, being even less, would be even less significant.
Yes, there certainly are. It's just that they don't contribute enough to make much of a difference, just a small fraction of the mass lost through fusion.
The only other way I can think of for the sun to lose mass is by that mass being ejected from the surface of the sun.
For that, there are basically two mechanisms, each with its own rates of mass loss:
1 million tonnes per second is one-fifth to one-quarter of the loss due to fusion, so it does not contribute much.
Some sources cite lower rates while a number of sources cite a slightly higher rate of 1.5 million tonnes per second.
I will factor it into a couple scenarios later in this section.
You will doubtless encounter references to T Tauri wind, so-named because of the behavior of T Tauri stars which expell large amounts of matter in their solar wind.
You will also doubtless hear that our sun had also gone through that T Tauri stage early in its life.
That has nothing to do with our discussion, because the T Tauri wind is the result of the ignition of a protostar's fusion reaction, whereupon the matter falling into the protostar is being forced away, that matter constituting the T Tauri wind.
This stage ends by the time the star arrives on the Main Sequence, that time marking the start of the star's life, and the star's mass at that time is considered to be its initial mass.
Since the claim under discussion only pertains to the sun's time on the Main Sequence, the T Tauri wind is irrelevant and can be safely ignored.
Since we don't really get an average rate of mass ejection, I'll do a worst-case approximation so that we can get a grip on an upper limit that will never actually be reached.
First, I'll double the average mass ejected in a CME, since that is a lower limit, to 3.2×109 tonnes.
The most frequent occurance of a CME is during a solar maximum with about 3.5 CMEs per day on average -- that's compared with one every five days during a solar minimum.
OK, let's get a rate of mass lost per second by CMEs based on the assumption of 3.5 CMEs occurring every single day for billions of years:
So what happens when we add these rates to the mass-loss rate due to fusion?
We already looked at that in the section, Your analysis of Hovind's rate may be well and good for that particular rate, but what about other rates?.
The effects are still minimal.
Let's create an unrealistically bad worst case: 5 million tonnes per second due to fusion, plus 2 million tonnes per second due to solar wind and CMEs for a total of 7 million tonnes per second.
Since we've already done those calculations in that prior section, here's that table again:
As we can clearly see, adding mass loss rates due to solar wind and CMEs has practically no effect on the results.
Their contribution is minimal.
However, it did occur to me that Kent Hovind's "inflated" rate of mass loss might not be so inflated after all.
We calculated the rate due to fusion to be 4.28 million tonnes.
It is possible that the 5-million-tonne rate may have been arrived at by also factoring in losses due to solar wind.
Hovind's response as to the source of his rate was that he had gotten it from textbooks ("Nearly any high school or college earth science book will give the sun's loss rate at about 5 million tons/sec."), which does not tell us what those books had said about what had gone into that figure.
It is possible that we've been incorporating the effects of solar wind and CMEs from the start.
But who's to know since Hovind ain't talkin'.
I will also introduce another creationist claim here, "The Shrinking Sun", a real favorite among creationists since 1980 despite its having been soundly refuted around the same time.
Both forms of the mass-loss claim that I've seen are tied directly to the "shrinking sun" claim apparently in order to support that claim, though I've seen the "shrinking sun" claim standing alone more often with no mention of mass loss.
My reason for introducing this other claim here is because it ties in with our investigation of the effects of mass loss on the size of the sun and provides us with the opportunity to investigate what kind of mass loss would be needed to support this other claim.
While Hovind's claim is mostly just hand-waving and doesn't give any specific figures outside of "5 million tons each second", I did find an older formulation that appears to date from around 1983, long before Hovind's ministry had started:
Among other things, in this section I plan to examine how much the sun's volume would need to change to support such a shrinkage rate for the sun's radius as well as how much mass loss would be needed to account for such a loss of volume.
I plan to approach those questions from both directions:
Here are some of the basic facts that we will need to consider:
The formula for the volume V of a sphere with a radius R is:
We could solve for the radius R to see what the radius would need to be for a given volume V (do please join in and do the algebra along with me):
Similarly, the rate at which the radius changes by volume (ie, the derivative dR/dV) would be:
Later in this section, we will be looking at the changes in volume as we change mass while keeping density the same, as well as to determine how much mass is contained in a particular volume.
Therefore, we want to solve that formula for the volume V and again for the mass m:
Of course, when we start figuring out how much mass has to be lost to account for various changes in volume and radius, we will need to know what the density of the sun is.
That's where it starts to get complicated, because the sun's density all depends on where in the sun you're looking. And that's because of the next basic fact.
In this section, I will try to get around this problem by holding some factors constant so we can see how the outcome varies for each individual factor, somewhat like working with
partial derivatives in calculus.
Basically, the major layers of the sun and their densities are, starting at the core and moving outwards:
By dividing the mass of the sun by its volume, we arrive at an average density of 1408 kg/m3.
First let's look at the basic problem of predicting what increasing or decreasing the mass of a star would do.
And since we're trying to predict/retrodict what the ancient sun with greater mass would be like, we'll discuss the effects of increasing the sun's mass.
If we increase the mass of the sun then a number of different things will happen, some of which will cause its size to increase and some that will cause its size to decrease.
What we need to figure out is what the net effect will be:
However, the sun is a compressible body, which means that we cannot depend on its density remaining constant.
If the sun's density is allowed to increase, then its size can actually decrease.
So the size of the sun does not depend directly on its mass, but rather on what that mass causes to happen.
The greater gravity wants to compress the sun more and make it smaller while the greater radiative pressure wants to expand it more and make it larger.
Where does the balance lie?
Astrophysicists have studied those processes and developed models that we could use to predict the outcome.
But to keep things simple, let's look at stars of different masses and see what effect that has on their sizes.
In reading the following table, please remember that the mass of a star determines many things about it including its temperature (and hence its color and spectral class) and how long it will last before using up its hydrogen fuel (the hotter it burns, the faster it burns and the sooner it runs out of fuel).
Also, a caveat: I had found this table about two decades ago and have lost any record of where I had gotten it from.
However, researching the same information from other sources should yield very close to the same results.
In reading the table, remember that the units of most of the columns are based directly on the sun, as indicated by "(sun)".
So the mass of a class B5 star would be 6.5 times that of the sun's mass, while its radius would be 3.8 times the sun's radius, and it would 600 times brighter than the sun.
This table shows how so many properties of a star depend on its mass.
We see that the more massive a star is, the hotter it is and the brighter it shines.
We also see that the more massive a star is, the shorter its lifespan, which only makes sense as discussed above, that the hotter and brighter a star is the faster it burns through its fuel.
Or in other words, because of the star's greater gravity, it compresses and heats up the core more causing the fusion reaction to run so much faster, which results in far greater energy generation, etc.
We also see that the more massive stars are much less abundant.
The majority of the stars, 73%, are the red stars, class M, which also last the longest (200 billion years compared to our sun's expected 12 billion-year lifespan).
But what we really want to know is whether more massive stars are bigger and by how much.
I think that intuition would have told us that they would be bigger and indeed they are as we can see on this table.
However, they are not that much bigger.
They certainly are not proportional. Doubling the mass (eg, A5) only results in a 1.7 increase in radius.
Six times the mass (eg, B5) and the radius is only about 4 times greater.
Yes, the more massive the star the larger its radius is, but the radius' growth lags behind that of the mass.
At this point we should revisit the original claim, which was that the ancient sun would have been so incredibly much larger and more massive.
We already found that the sun's mass 5 billion years ago would have been about 1.00039673 times what it currently is.
So how much larger would it have been?
From the table, we see that the ancient sun's mass would lie between 1 and 1.06 for a G0 star and that the G0 star's radius is 1.1.
Using the ancient art of interpolation (which was drilled into us in the 1960's in order for us to use log and trig tables, but which has since been killed off by scientific calculators), I estimate that the ancient sun's radius would have been 1.0006612167 times larger. Which would have been about 460 km greater.
I have a feeling that the periodic oscillations in the sun's size are far larger than that.
But radius is not the only way to measure the sun's size. There's also volume.
That table did not include volume, but I used the table's data to calculate the volumes of the stars in units of the radius of the sun.
Then I divided all of those volumes by the sun's volume to get another column of the ratio of each star's volume to the sun's volume.
And to top it off, I calculated the density of each star relative to the sun's average density.
Here is that table:
At first, it may seem that the increase in volume is following the increase in mass, but it really isn't.
Rather, what we do see is an exponential increase in volume because volume increases by the cube of the radius, so a small change in the radius can cause a large change in the volume.
Now turn your attention to average density, which I calculated by dividing the star's mass (relative to the sun's mass) by its volume (relative to the sun's volume).
The more massive the star is, the lower its average density.
Now that's interesting.
It appears that while the increased mass increases gravity, the subsequent increase that that causes in the rate of the core's fusion reaction results in much stronger radiative pressure pushing outwards.
It would appear that in that hydrostatic equilibrium balancing gravitational collapse and radiative pressure, radiative pressure turns out to be the stronger force.
The greater gravity from the increased mass results in far greater radiative pressure which balloons the volume of the star out so much that the star's overall density decreases.
I believe that this answers our questions about the size of the ancient sun; ie, what the sun was like 5 billion years ago.
Using Kent Hovind's rate of mass loss, we determined that 5 billion years ago the ancient sun's mass would have been 1.00039673 times its current mass.
Based on that ancient mass, we interpolated the ancient sun's radius to have been about 1.0006612167 times larger (ie, 460 km greater in 5 billion years (3.44×10-8 feet per hour) as opposed to creationists's claim of 2.5 feet per hour).
That would have made the ancient sun's volume slightly greater, about 1.001985 times greater.
That in turn would have made the ancient sun's average density slightly less, about 0.998415 times what it is now which would have been about 1405.7682 kg/m3.
Yet again, we find that the sun 5 billion years ago would have been only very slightly different in size than it currently is.
That last section only dealt with how the loss of mass would affect the sun's size, such that the sun would become smaller over time, but by a very low proportion of the mass lost.
We found that the size of the sun is directly dependent on the sun's hydrostatic equilibrium and how the radiative pressure from the core's fusion reaction balances against gravitational collapse.
Radiative pressure is directly dependent on how fast the fusion reaction is, which is directly dependent on the temperature of the core, which is caused by for the force of gravity compressing the core, which is caused by the sun's mass.
We also found that the effects of radiative pressure seem to be greater than the force of gravity.
The overall effect appears to be for the sun to be slowly shrinking over time, albeit at a vastly slower rate than creationists claim; ie, at about 3.44×10-8 feet per hour as opposed to creationists's claim of 2.5 feet per hour.
But gravitational collapse due to mass is not the only factor affecting the temperature of the core and hence the rate of the fusion reaction (and hence the amount of radiative pressure and hence the size of the sun).
The accumulation of helium, the by-product of the fusion reaction, in the core is slowing increasing its temperature, as we have already discussed.
This is causing a slow increase in radiative pressure unrelated to mass.
At the same time, there's less mass to generate gravity and hence there's less gravity to counter the increase in radiative pressure.
As a result, the sun is slowing growing over time with its radius increasing by about an inch a year.
So the ancient sun was actually smaller than the present-day sun is.
Now for the fun project: exploring the volume/mass-loss requirements of creationist claims.
In this section, our goal will be to examine the sheer scales involved in dealing with solar volume and mass and therefore what volume and mass creationist claims would actually entail.
First, let's quickly review the relationship between mass, volume, and density:
V = m / ρ
m = ρ×V
Density can be a very handy tool.
Have you ever wondered how the park guides know how much a particular boulder weighs?
Did they ever put it on a scale to weigh it? No, nor did they ever need to.
If they know the boulder's size (volume) and they know its density, then from that they can calculate its mass and hence its weight by using the formula above:
Now, there are a few simplifying assumptions that we are going to make here:
But considering how it takes a lot of mass to change the size of the sun appreciably, many times more than the total amount of mass lost so far in the sun's 5 billion years, the much smaller amounts that we will be talking about shouldn't really bring the sun's compressibility into play.
IOW, this assumption shouldn't throw us off that much. Rather, it will be Assumption #3 that will do that.
However, that claim's main "explanation" for that "shrinkage" is gravitational collapse.
It assumes that the sun has not yet reached hydrodynamic equilibrium. A consequence of that belief is that a portion of the sun's radiant energy comes from that gravitational collapse through the
Kelvin‐Helmholtz mechanism.
And a further consequence of that is that the mass lost would be much lower since a much lower proportion of the sun's energy output would be due to fusion.
Bottom line is that:
Naturally, we would expect the volume lost due to fusion to be felt in the sun's core where that fusion reaction is taking place, therefore that volume loss would be in accordance with the much higher density at the sun's core.
We would also expect the volume lost due to solar wind et al. to be felt at the sun's surface in the photosphere where the density is very much lower.
And we will indeed examine that scenario.
But then we will examine the effects of mass loss on volume in various parts of the sun, just for fun and for our edification.
Therefore, I will start out by applying the 4.3 million tonne figure to the core, because that is where that mass is actually being lost, and the one million tonne figure to the photosphere, because that is where that mass is actually being lost.
And then I'll combine them again and apply them to each region of the sun just to get some perspective.
Furthermore, since the "shrinking sun" rate for the sun's diameter was 5 feet per hour, we will work within a time frame of one hour.
So, also assuming the mass-loss rates we had obtained in sections above (the sum of which was rounded down in Kent Hovind's mass-loss rate), the values we will be working with will be:
Now let's get started!
First, let's see what volumes would be lost in the core and in the photosphere by the two processes for mass loss: hydrogen fusion in the core and solar wind and CMEs in the photosphere.
Remember that this is the most realistic scenario, barring the fact that we're not taking compressibility into account.
We will employ the formula:
Now let's see what the effects on that mass loss would be on the sun's volume:
That's less than one-tenth of a cubic kilometer, about 1/48,561,124,892 (one 48-trillionth) of the required hourly volume loss.
IOW, practically no volume loss experienced.
That's a much healthier looking slice, but will it be enough?
So how does that compare to the loss of volume expected from the claimed radius shrinkage of 2.5 feet per hour?
That came to 4,634,563,584 km3, which is about 257.475 times greater than 18,000,000.0954 (BTW, the effects of adding the miniscule volume loss in the core just get lost in rounding off).
That falls far short of what the "shrinking sun" claim would need.
We divided the rate of mass loss into different rates for different regions of the sun with different densities in order to account for different processes for mass loss.
That is to say that a total rate of 5.3 million tonnes per second was divided into 4.3 million tonnes per second for the core, which is where loss due to hydrogen fusion occurs, and one million tonnes per second for the photosphere, which is where loss due to solar wind, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), et al. occur.
Our results do not come anywhere close to what they would need to be if they were to offer any support for creationist claims about the sun shrinking.
The enormous size of the sun and the enormous amount of volume that we are trying to account for (4,634,563,584 km3) are just too great.
Now what would happen if we take the entire mass loss and apply it to the densities of various parts of the sun, including the sun's average density?
I'll even be generous and add the two rates together rather than going with Hovind's lower rate.
So we'll use the rate of 5.3×106 tonnes/sec (5.3 million) which yields an hourly rate of
19.08×109 tonnes/hour (19.08 billion).
Now let's apply that to the different densities:
This time we took the total rate of mass loss and applied it to three different densities even though it makes no practical sense to do so.
What we found in each case was that the resultant volume loss still fell far short of what the claim would require.
Now let's take the opposite approach. We know what volume the claim needs for the sun to lose in one hour's time, so how much mass would need to be lost?
To calculate that, we will use this formula:
Given that a shrinkage of the sun's diameter by 5 feet per hour, that would result in the sun's volume decreasing by 4,634,563,584 km3 in one hour.
We also use our modified Hovind rate of mass loss of 5.3 million tonnes/second which is greater than his own rate (5 million tonnes per second) and which translates to an hourly rate of 19.08 billion tonnes/hour (19.08×109).
Now let's see what the various densities will yield:
This time we applied the amount of volume loss that the claim requires, 4,634,563,584 km3, and applied it to three different densities to see how much mass loss that would require.
In each case, we found the necessary amount of mass loss to vastly exceed the actual amount lost.
Yet again, we fail to find any support for the claim.
Finally, let's look at the effect that the current rate of mass loss would have on the radius of the sun.
We will do this by taking the formula for volume and solving it for the radius, as we had done above:
R3 = V / ((4/3) × π)
R3 = 3V / 4π
R = cuberoot(3V / 4π)
Next we need a formula for determining the change in the radius (ΔR) for a given change in volume (ΔV).
However, trying to approach the problem algebraically turned out to be difficult, because our ΔR not only depends on the ΔV, but it also depends on the original radius, R0.
Plus, ΔR did not want to factor out neatly to one side.
This is the approach I came up with:
OK, we have the procedure and we have a batch of ΔV's from a previous section, so let's turn to!
As you will recall, those ΔV's are the volumes lost by applying the mass lost in one hour,
19.08×109 tonnes/hour (19.08 billion), to different densities.
Here is a table containing the ΔV's and their corresponding ΔR's:
It seems odd that the average and core density calculations yielded the same new radius.
I think that the difference between the two were so small that it disappeared from Excel's floating-point operations; that is a common problem with computer floating-point operations, that the floating-point format has a set limit on its precision, on the detail in which the quantity is expressed in terms of the number of digits that are used.
Whatever the cause, it does not change what we do discover, which is that the loss of volume due to the loss of mass per hour is so miniscule as to have virtually no effect on the sun's radius.
OK, I think that we have discussed the subject as thoroughly as possible.
And every approach we take and every which way we look at it, Hovind's solar-mass-loss claim is completely bogus.
As I said in the beginning, if you think there's something that I haven't mentioned or discussed but I should have,
then do please by all means tell me about it through my "Contact me" link.
And if you have any questions or objections to anything on this page, then again do please by all means tell me about it through my "Contact me" link.
Share and enjoy!
First uploaded on 2002 May 20.
Abstract
This page examines a claim which is part of a larger claim: The Shrinking Sun.
Created in 1980, the "shrinking sun" is one of those many claims which were refuted immediately and then over and over again ad infinitum as the creationist community continues to use it despite its being been proven completely false so many times.
I have a list of resources on the "shrinking sun" claim in the section on this page,
For Further Reading on the "Shrinking Sun" Claim; they include the original claim and several refutations, including a refutation by a young earth creationist.
Follow those links for a more complete presentation and discussion.
Caveats and Notes
Yes, I am sure that you will find this to be a boring digression.
It used to be even worse before I edited this section down [1].
However, it is important that we know what we are talking about, so I have kept this much in.
Caveat:
When I developed and wrote this page, I was mainly familiar with the original Akridge "shrinking sun" claim and had not yet realized the extent to which mass loss had been incorporated into the claim.
Number Names:
Basically, there are two different systems for naming large numbers (see
Wikipedia): the original European "long scale" that increments numbers names by a factor of one million and the American "short scale" (adopted by the UK in 1974) that increments them by a factor of one thousand.
The long scale is more logical, since the number name gives you the power of a million that gives you that value, whereas you have to build up the short-scale values as you go.
Tons:
We need to establish which "ton" we're using on this page, an issue which caused me a bit of confusion at first.
The three possibilities are the short ton (2,000 lb / 907.1847 kg), the long ton (2,240 lb / 1,016.047 kg), and the metric ton (1,000 kg / 2,204.623 lb in a 1-g gravity field) -- volume in shipping is also measured in tons, but we can ignore that here.
If you want to read the original version of this section, you can find it here.
Introduction
It has long been my practice to approach a new creationist claim by taking it seriously and at face value, and evaluating it on its own merits.
This has proven to be an effective approach to debunking many claims.
I want to see how they had arrived at their conclusion and I especially want to see their figures and calculations when the claim is about rates and how by extrapolating back 4.5 billion years it would yield an impossibly large size/mass/intensity/whatever.
Almost every time, they have nothing to offer except for a lot of hand-waving and desperate attempts to change the subject.
Furthermore, just by doing the math that they describe or allude to, their claim evaporates,
hence my quote above, "Do the math!"
The Claim
The claim in question is one made repeatedly by Kent Hovind that the Sun is losing its mass at such a high rate that 4.5 billion years ago it would have been so large and massive that it would have sucked the earth in and/or burned it up.
All you got to do is step outside and look up. Obviously the Sun is burning. It's losing 5 million tons every second. You can't just keep losing 5 million tons a second, pretty soon you start to lose weight. And so the Sun is losing this mass -- 5 million tons every second -- which means it used to be larger. And it used to be more massive. If you increase the mass of the Sun, going backwards in time for several billion years, you start to create a problem with the gravitational balance between the earth and the Sun. It's going to suck the earth in and destroy everything.
Please note that if Hovind was using short tons, then his "5 million tons" figure would actually be 4.536 million tonnes, which is actually closer to the actual mass lost through hydrogen fusion.
However, Hovind indicated in correspondence (which had otherwise proven to be useless) that he gotten his value from a book which doubtless was as ambiguous about the kind of tons it was using as astronomy sites have proven to be.
Therefore, given my assumption that astronomy's "tons" are actual metric tonnes, I will treat that "5 million tons each second" rate and the resultant total mass lost as being in tonnes.
And since his rate isn't accurate anyway, it will still be close enough to be acceptable.
Let's Do the Math!
BTW, Hovind seems to always tie this claim in with another claim, that of the
"shrinking sun" which claims that the sun's diameter is shrinking a such a high rate that mere millions of years ago it would have been so large as to have engulfed and burned the earth.
Of course that claim is utterly false, being an unjustified extrapolation based on a single unpublished report of flawed observations, but since when has the truth ever meant anything to creationists?
QED
That refutes Kent Hovind's solar-mass-loss claim.
The amount of mass lost is so minute and insignificant that it could not have possibly caused the effects that Hovind claims.
And Hovind would have known that if he had bothered to do the math.
Hovind's Claim
In the twenty years that I'd been following creation/evolution, that was the most outlandish and most obviously false claim I had ever seen.
As any good scientist will tell you, the Sun burns half of its mass every year. If you multiply the Sun's mass by millions (even though science says it is in the billions) the Sun will be so incredibly huge it will stretch out past Pluto. And if you say that the planets would stay close to the Sun as it shrank, then why don't the planets still move closer?
It is very difficult to determine whether that youth minister had been the one to mangle the claim up so badly or whether the damage had already been done long before he got hold of it, but it is very telling of the creationist community that such an obviously bogus claim would continue to be accepted and spread indiscriminately; I am thinking, of course, of what Jesus said of millstones and those who would mislead children (Matthew 18:6, Mark 9:42, Luke 17:2), which that youth minister should have been very aware of.
But Wait, It Gets Worse
The shrinking Sun limits the earth-Sun relationship to fewer than billions of years. The Sun is losing both mass and diameter. Changing the mass would upset the fine gravitational balance that keeps the earth at just the right distance for life to survive.
Now, it is a very daunting task to have to sit through hours upon hours of Kent Hovind nonsense (to describe it with extreme generosity), one that turns your stomach.
So before I was able to get to that quote, I first found this other one which gave the rate.
It was only much later that I finally stumbled across the quote from Hovind's seminar, so it was this one below from Southwest Radio Church that formed the basis of my research.
All you got to do is step outside and look up. Obviously the Sun is burning. It's losing 5 million tons every second. You can't just keep losing 5 million tons a second, pretty soon you start to lose weight. And so the Sun is losing this mass -- 5 million tons every second -- which means it used to be larger. And it used to be more massive. If you increase the mass of the Sun, going backwards in time for several billion years, you start to create a problem with the gravitational balance between the earth and the Sun. It's going to suck the earth in and destroy everything.
For instance, the Sun is burning, of course, and it's burning an enormous amount of fuel.
It's losing about 5 million tons every second.
Well, if the earth is billions of years old that creates a problem, because you couldn't go back 5 billion or 20 billion years like they say with the Sun constantly getting larger and larger and heavier and heavier.
The Sun's gravity would of course become real great and would suck the earth in.
Plus the Sun would be bigger and burn the earth up.
It can't possibly be true that it's billions of years old.
(my transcription taken from the audio at
http://www.swrc.com/ramfiles/sept1302.ram (link broken) at 8 minutes 53 seconds into the broadcast)
Trying to Get a Straight Answer from Hovind
Listener's letter: [.....] It is said the Sun is a burning ball of gas, in other words fire. What is the one thing that fire needs to burn? Oxygen. How come that stars continue to burn if they have no oxygen to keep them burning? [.....]
Nobody ever expects the Illuminati!
TITLE: EXACT ILLUMINIST TIMETABLE FOR PRODUCING ANTICHRIST HAS BEEN REVEALED TO CUTTING EDGE MINISTRIES!
We were still not sure exactly why Jupiter could not ignite, especially if it were hit with the huge atomic explosion of 1,750 Megatons, as occult sources are saying will occur when the 49.7 pounds of plutonium in the spacecraft Galileo is turned into the planet on December 6. After all, the largest thermonuclear explosion on earth was the Russian test of only 100 megatons in 1961. The answer we received from a Christian scientist, Dr. Kent Hovind, [www.drdino.com] explained the science to us so we could understand. In the NASA excerpt, quoted above, we learned that "most" of the mass of Jupiter is Hydrogen and Helium, a most explosive mix, if it is mixed with sufficient oxygen in order to burn this mixture. Dr. Hovind says Jupiter does not contain enough oxygen in order to sustain the type of continuous burning that would be needed to produce a star. Now, we understand and now it all makes sense. No matter how large the initial explosion might be, the lack of sufficient quantities of oxygen would snuff out any resulting fire rather quickly.
This Claim is Apparently Older than We Thought
It was truly amazing how hard he worked to avoid answering my simple and highly pertinent questions.
He even tried twice to pick a fight with me over my email name, DWise1.
He only stopped doing that after I replied that its origin is actually quite mundane and I would gladly relay it to him.
In the end, the closest he had come to answering any of those questions was to say that he had gotten that 5-million-tons-per-second rate from a book:
"Nearly any high school or college earth science book will give the
sun's loss rate at about 5 million tons/sec. To complicate things it
probably burned at a different (faster most likely) rate in the early
stages when it was larger. I state in my seminar that it obviously
used to have more mass and this puts a time limit on the earth sun
relationship. There are scores of factors that limit the age of the
earth to less than the billions some arbitrarily assign to it."
I will be the first to say that I have learned much from my critics and have changed things in my seminars over the years because of their legitimate gripes, corrections and suggestions. "Iron sharpeneth iron." (Prov. 27:17) These critics can be a man's best friend, if they don't distract you from the main job.
God knows that I want to be accurate and would never purposely tell a lie to promote my point.
I may not always be right, but if I am saying it in my seminar then I don't know it to be false. I work hard and research a lot to try to be right. I am certainly willing to be corrected by friend or foe.
Even if it is proven that I am teaching something that is not correct, don't be fooled into thinking that one incorrect statement means everything else I say is wrong. Any third grader should know that.
A good and noble start, but he had made it truly believing that
"The questions found on this site remain unanswered by the evolutionist" and hence no one would be able to answer any of them.
Shortly after every single one of his claims had been answered and refuted, he fell victim to creationist dishonesty and removed all trace of those answers even while falsely continuing to ask for feedback.
IOW, that's a deliberate lie [3].
Any feedback that you care to give, pro or con, please pass it along. We will reply to each message, although sometimes it just may take a little time.
How big was the Sun 1 billion years ago?
How big was the Sun 1 billion years ago?
However, that claim had been so badly mangled by being passed along a long line of creationists that we cannot reconstruct its original form, let alone who had originated it.
As any good scientist will tell you, the Sun burns half of its mass every year. If you multiply the Sun's mass by millions (even though science says it is in the billions) the Sun will be so incredibly huge it will stretch out past Pluto. And if you say that the planets would stay close to the Sun as it shrank, then why don't the planets still move closer?
If you are aware of a non-Hovind solar-mass-loss claim, please pass it on to me with as complete a bibliography as you can provide.
Please keep in mind that I am not asking for the "shrinking sun" claim, even though that claim seems to always be linked with this claim such that this solar-mass-loss claim is used to bolster the "shrinking sun" claim.
Update: 2018 January 17 (addended 2018 February 19)
I came across a site by one Sean O'Rourke where he attempts to make his own solar-mass-loss claim in the
"The Solar Clock" section of his page, https://www.ithasbeenwritten.com/evolution.
In this one, he lifts one statement out of a NASA web page and appears be claiming that the sun is losing 600 million tons of mass per second (the writing is a shambles, which I will touch on below).
When I emailed him with a correction of his simple, purely factual error, which included pointing out where the correct information is in his own source, his reply completely avoided the simple facts that he had gotten wrong and then he closed his email account and removed the contact page on his site -- he alluded to having received emails from a number of other people commenting on his site.
He wasn't beligerent as most creationists tend to be, but rather unwilling to even consider the possibility that he had made such a grievous factual error, brushing off my email as nothing more than a difference of opinion.
Facts are facts, not opinion.
Of course, his own source tells him that, out of those 600 million tons of hydrogen consumed by the fustion reaction, 596 million tons of helium are produced with the remaining 4 million tons having been lost as energy -- the answers to Questions #13, #14, #19, #20, and #24 specifically refer to helium being produced.
For that matter, every reaction involves inputs (matter and energy being consumed) and outputs (matter and energy being produced)
such that the total amounts of inputs being consumed must equal the total amounts of outputs being produced.
15. How Much Mass Does the Sun Consume?
I heard at one time the amount of matter that is converted by the Sun into energy and released, but have been unable to remember the quantity stated. It was given as the number of Earth masses that are converted every month or year.
The Sun consumes about 600 million tons of hydrogen per second. (That's 6 x 108 tons.) For comparison, the mass of the Earth is about 1.35 x 1021 tons. This would mean the Sun consumes the mass of the Earth in about 70,000 years.
I would not attribute his false claim to deliberate dishonesty, which is a far too common trait among far too many creationists. Rather, it is his own inability to understand his source that is to blame for his having made that false claim and his arrogance for refusing to recognize and correct his mistakes.
As I recall from his contact page (now gone), he described himself as a "master mechanic" and admitted that he didn't know much about science (as I recall, since that contact page no longer exists because he had deliberately removed it to avoid any help to correct his mistakes) and hence did not understand the basics of fusion reactions.
As I recall, he also said that he was a fairly recent convert to his sect which appears to lean fundamentalist, so he would still be in that initial zealot phase.
So what did Dr. Louis Barbier mean? [DWise1: I'm refering to Item #15 quoted above]
"Even if you have never done math in your life you can still tell me that when your car runs out of fuel, there is no more fuel in the tank. The Sun is no different. It's burning it's own matter which is its cause for gravity."
When you burn that car's fuel, does the matter cease to exist? No, it does continue to exist. The fuel-air mixture is consumed in the rapid oxidation reaction in the cylinders and produces exhaust gases. Every single atom in that fuel-air mixture that is consumed by the reaction ends up in the exhaust gases; no matter is lost, but rather it just goes somewhere else.
Again, it is not precisely clear just what point Sean is trying to make, so I'll present and discuss the two that I think I see:
So just how many years is that?
As I already derived on this page, there are 31,556,925.9747 seconds in one year, about 31.56 million seconds, AKA 3.15569259747×107 seconds.
Continuing to do the math:
rate × time = distance (or total whatever we're working with): r × t = d
t = (7.30394415×1026 tonnes) / (600 million tonnes / second)
t = 1.217324025×1018 seconds
We've determined the age of the sun to be about 4.5 billion years.
38.5754945 billion years is 8.57 times that.
That means that there is far more hydrogen fuel available to keep the sun burning for another 30 billion years, except other things will have happened before then, as I describe below.
t = (1.217324025×1018 seconds) / (3.15569259747×107 seconds/year)
t = 3.85754945×1010 years
t = 38.5754945 billion (109) years
So then maybe he's trying to say that the sun only has a certain amount of mass and when it has lost all that mass then there's no more.
OK, working on that assumption, let's do the math again!
Again we're working from a total solar mass of 1.98855×1027 tonnes, about 73.46% of which is hydrogen, only half of which is available for fusion, so again we'll take the initial "full fuel tank" mass as 7.30394415×1026 tonnes of hydrogen.
"Even if you have never done math in your life you can still tell me that when your car runs out of fuel, there is no more fuel in the tank. The Sun is no different. It's burning it's own matter which is its cause for gravity."
Oh! We've been here before! 1.217324025×1018 seconds is 38.5754945 billion (109) years, which is 8.57 times longer than the current age of the sun (4.5 billion years).
Yet again, the math does not support Sean O'Rourke's claims.
rate × time = distance (or total whatever we're working with): r × t = d
t = (7.30394415×1026 tonnes) / (600 million tonnes / second)
t = 1.217324025×1018 seconds
More Details
Here I have tried to anticipate and address any questions and concerns that you might have or objections that you might want to raise.
If your question/concern/objection is not addressed below, then please communicate it to me and I will address it in a direct response to you and may also add it to this page.
or stated more generally (links to same section):
However are we supposed to know how much mass the sun loses every second?
How does the Sun shine?
Of course, I'm lumping several ancient ideas together here.
Basically the resemblance between the sun and a fire as sources of heat and light has not been lost on the people of any era.
"Dr. Hovind says Jupiter does not contain enough oxygen in order to sustain the type of continuous burning that would be needed to produce a star."
"Dr." Hovind was clearly talking about combustion, not the fusion reaction that would need to be triggered in Jupiter's core in order to turn it into a second star.
The real reason why that can't happen is because Jupiter would have to be at least 10 times more massive to be able to heat up its core enough to start a hydrogen-burning fusion reaction.
That is exactly what the astronomers contacted by Cutting Edge Ministries had told them, but they simply could not understand the right answer.
This idea was advanced in the 19th century and is known as the
Kelvin‐Helmholtz mechanism.
As the sun's mass condenses about the core, the gasses' potential energy is released as heat.
Of course, once the gravitational contraction stopped, the sun would lose this source of energy and would start to cool.
Although this idea has been replaced by nuclear fusion, many creationists have tried to revive it, especially in connection with the "shrinking sun" claim.
This idea was proposed in 1939 by Hans Bethe, which earned him the 1967 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Under temperatures of millions of degrees in a star's core, lighter elements fuse together to form heavier elements, during which a small amount of the mass is converted to energy.
More specifically, every second about 600 million tonnes of hydrogen is being fused into about 596 million tonnes of helium in the sun's core, during which about 4 million tonnes of matter is converted into energy.
This process is commonly called "hydrogen burning" and the resultant helium is commonly referred to as "helium ash".
IOW, hydrogen fusion is the only method of powering the sun that we know of which would result in the loss of mass.
"No mass is lost in a fire." Someone once told me on a forum that that statement is not strictly true.
He stated that chemical bonds do contain some very small amount of mass and that the heat generated by the fire comes from the mass of those bonds being converted to energy.
Why do you talk specifically about hydrogen fusion? Are there other kinds? If so, then why exclude them?
On those last two points, note that the hotter most massive class O stars will leave the Main Sequence after just a few million years while the cooler least massive class M stars can stay on the Main Sequence for hundreds of billions of years (the age of the universe is estimated to about 13 to 14 billion years).
A mid-sized star like the sun (class G2) can last for about 10 billion years; our sun is estimated to be only half-way through its 10 billion years.
So then very basically, what will happen when the star's core reaction runs out of hydrogen is that the radiative pressure that had been pushing against gravitational contraction will diminish and the star will begin to collapse, compressing the core, which increases the core's temperature.
When the core gets hot enough, then the next heavier element, starting with helium, will start to fuse, which will restore the radiative pressure and establish hydrodynamic equilibrium again.
However, since this is a hotter reaction, that radiative pressure will be greater and hence the star will be larger.
Since the star is larger, its surface area will be far greater ( S = 4πR2 ).
When the star's internal energy gets spread out over that far greater area, its surface temperature will be lower and hence the color will shift towards red.
The general effect will be that the star will grow into a red giant, but what actually happens depends on different factors, the primary one being the star's mass.
hydrogen (H) → helium (He) → carbon (C) → neon (Ne) → oxygen (O) → silicon (Si) → iron (Fe).
See the Key reactions section on Wikipedia's Stellar nucleosynthesis page.
Each subsequent fusion reaction requires a higher temperature, for which the star needs to be ever more massive to attain.
If the star is not massive enough to trigger the next higher fusion reaction, then that's as far as it will ever get.
Therefore, only the most massive stars will be able work their way all the way up to producing iron, while the least massive stars won't even be able to get helium to fuse into carbon.
A star with the mass of the sun will be able to fuse helium into carbon, but will unable to ignite carbon fusion.
Now you can see that it is only a mature star that has left the Main Sequence which uses any form of fusion other than hydrogen fusion.
While a star is on the Main Sequence, it is being powered by hydrogen fusion.
Since the sun is in the middle of its time on the Main Sequence, it is only using hydrogen fusion.
Stellar spectra -- see here for more details.
The triple-alpha process.
Your analysis of Hovind's rate may be well and good for that particular rate, but what about other rates?
The columns in the following table display values pertaining to each of the mass loss rates and times:
Figures and Effects for Various Mass Loss Rates and Times
Time
(billions
of years)Loss Rate
(tonnes/sec)Percent Loss
(%)Mass Lost
(tonnes)Original Mass
(tonnes)Gravity
(× Present)
Original Orbit
(million miles)"Sucked in" by
(mi)
5
4 million
0.03172856
6.31138519×1023
1.98918114×1027
1.00031739
92.92640843
29,494
5
5 million
0.03965755
7.88923149×1023
1.98933892×1027
1.00039673
92.91903796
36,864
5
6 million
0.04758529
9.46707779×1023
1.98949671×1027
1.00047608
92.91166866
44,233
5
7 million
0.05551177
1.10449241×1024
1.98965449×1027
1.00055543
92.90430053
51,601
10
5 million
0.07928367
1.57784630×1024
1.99012785×1027
1.00079347
92.88220315
73,699
Where does Hovind's "5 million tons every second" figure come from?
or stated more generally:
However are we supposed to know how much mass the sun loses every second?
The sun's energy output per second is E = 3.846×1026 Joules
E = 3.846×1026 Joules = 3.846×1026 (kg × m2 / sec2)
c = 299,792,458 meters per second
c2 = 89,875,517,873,681,764 m2/sec2
m = E/(c2) = 3.846×1026 / 8.9875517873681764×1016
= 4,279,252,115.58
(kg × m2 / sec2) / (m2/sec2)
Therefore, m = 4,279,252,115.58 kg = 4,279,252.11558 tonnes
= kg × m2 / m2 × sec2 / sec2 = kg
and the rate of mass loss is 4.28 million tonnes per second.
Yes, that is correct. You can treat units as algebraic variables and solve for the units of your result.
That was one of the cooler things I learned in physics.
As it turns out, this is an essential part of physics and of chemistry, such that
YouTube has several videos covering the subject of unit conversion, mainly for students of physics and chemistry.
But if the rate were greater in the past, couldn't that provide the ginormous amount of mass loss this claim requires?
Hydrogen:
Standard atomic weight 1.008
Standard atomic weight 4.002602
4 × 1.008 = 4.032
4.032000
- 4.002602
----------
0.029398
0.029398 / 4.032000 = 0.729 %
These are what the table's columns represent:
Figures and Effects for Maximum Possible Mass Loss (Independent of Loss Rates and Time)
Original Solar Mass
(tonnes)Percent Loss
(%)Total Mass Lost
(tonnes)New Solar Mass
(tonnes)New Gravity
(new ÷ original)
Original Earth Orbit
(million miles)New Orbit
(million miles)Drifted out by
(mi)
1.98933892×1027
0.2454
4.88183772×1024
1.98445709×1027
0.997546
92.919038
93.14762223
228,087
1.98933892×1027
0.729
1.45022807×1025
1.97483664×1027
0.99271
92.919038
93.60139211
682,354
How can we assume a constant rate of mass loss?
But wait! There's more!
The Sun is gradually becoming hotter during its time on the main sequence, because the helium atoms in the core occupy less volume than the hydrogen atoms that were fused. The core is therefore shrinking, allowing the outer layers of the Sun to move closer to the centre and experience a stronger gravitational force, according to the inverse-square law. This stronger force increases the pressure on the core, which is resisted by a gradual increase in the rate at which fusion occurs. This process speeds up as the core gradually becomes denser. It is estimated that the Sun has become 30% brighter in the last 4.5 billion years. At present, it is increasing in brightness by about 1% every 100 million years.
Aren't there any other ways for the sun to lose mass?
So as big and impressive as CMEs appear to be, the mass loss attributed to them is very small compared to the losses due to fusion.
We just went out of our way to over-inflate that rate grossly and yet even that gross overinflation turned out to be puny, about 1/39th of the loss due to fusion and a fifth of the loss due to solar wind.
3.5 CMEs per day × 3.2×109 tonnes / CME
= 11.2×109 tonnes / day
= (11.2×109 tonnes / day) × (1 day / 86,400 seconds)
= (11.2×109 tonnes / day) × (1/(8.64×104) day/seconds)
= (11.2/8.64×10(9-4) tonnes / day) × (1 day / 86,400 seconds)
= 1.296296×105 tonnes / second
= 129.6296×103 tonnes / second
= 129,629.6 tonnes / second
= 0.1296296 million tonnes / second
Figures and Effects for Various Mass Loss Rates and Times
Time
(billions
of years)Loss Rate
(tonnes/sec)Percent Loss
(%)Mass Lost
(tonnes)Original Mass
(tonnes)Gravity
(× Present)
Original Orbit
(million miles)"Sucked in" by
(mi)
5
4 million
0.03172856
6.31138519×1023
1.98918114×1027
1.00031739
92.92640843
29,494
5
5 million
0.03965755
7.88923149×1023
1.98933892×1027
1.00039673
92.91903796
36,864
5
6 million
0.04758529
9.46707779×1023
1.98949671×1027
1.00047608
92.91166866
44,233
5
7 million
0.05551177
1.10449241×1024
1.98965449×1027
1.00055543
92.90430053
51,601
10
5 million
0.07928367
1.57784630×1024
1.99012785×1027
1.00079347
92.88220315
73,699
Exactly how would changing the mass of the sun affect its size?
That shrinkage rate was taken from the original claim,
THE SUN IS SHRINKING, which states that the sun's diameter is supposed to be shrinking by 5 feet per hour and hence the radius is decreasing by 2.5 feet per hour.
That means that changing the radius R causes the volume V to change by the cube of R; eg, double the radius of a sphere and you increase its volume eight-fold (ie, by a factor of 23, which is 8).
More exactly, the rate at which volume changes by radius (ie, the derivative dV/dR) would be:
V = (4/3) × π × R3
That tells you the rate at which changing the radius will cause the volume to change.
dV/dR = 4π × R2
That means that changing the volume V causes the radius R to change by the cube root of V; eg, double the volume of a sphere and you increase its radius by the cube root of 2, which is about 1.26 -- IOW, not by very much.
R = cuberoot(3/(4π) × V)
= cuberoot(3/(4π)) × cuberoot(V)
That tells you the rate at which changing the radius will cause the volume to change.
dR/dV = (cuberoot(3/(4π)) / 3) × V-2/3
= (cuberoot(3/(4π)) / 3) × 1 / cuberoot(V2)
In physics, we were taught two systems of units using the metric system:
centimeter-gram-second (cgs) for small-scale systems and
meter-kilogram-second (MKS) for large-scale systems.
In cgs, density is given as grams per cubic centimeter (g/cm3),
which is equivalent to grams per milliliter (g/ml).
In MKS, it is given as kilograms per cubic meter (kg/m3).
Since the sun is a large-scale system, I will use kg/m3 here.
ρ = m / V, where m is mass and V is volume
As you can plainly see, there is a direct relationship between mass and volume, but not between mass and radius.
In order to work out that relationship, we will need to substitute the formula for volume for V:
V = m / ρ
m = V × ρ
And things start getting messy, especially if we start taking derivatives again.
m = ρ × V
= ρ × (4/3) × π × R3
For comparison, the density of air at sea level is about 1.2 kg/m3 and effectively goes to zero about 20 miles up, pretty close to the density of the sun's photosphere.
The top of the photosphere is the visible surface of the sun.
Equatorial radius
695,700 km
109 × Earth's
Equatorial circumference
4.379×106 km
109 × Earth's
Flattening
9×10-6
Surface area
6.09×1012 km2
12,000 × Earth's
Volume
1.41×1018 km3
1.41×1027 m3
1,300,000 × Earth's
Mass
(1.98855±0.00025)×1030 kg
333,000 × Earth's
Average density
1.408 g/cm3
1408 kg/m3
0.255 × Earth's
Center density
162.2 g/cm3
1.622×105 kg/m3
12.4 × Earth's
Photosphere density
2×10-4 kg/m3
1 astronomical unit (AU)
149,600,000 km
92,956,000 miles
4.8481×10-6 pc
1.5813×10-5 ly
Spectal
classMass
(sun)Radius
(sun)Luminosity
(sun) Surface
temperature
(degrees K)Life time
(Ma)Relative
abundance
(in %)
W >40 20 1.000.000 50 <1 negligible
O5 32 18 600,000 40 1 0.00002
B0 16 7.4 16,000 28 10
B5 6.5 3.8 600 15.5 100 0.1
A0 3.2 2.5 60 9.9 500
A5 2.1 1.7 20 8.5 1000 1
F0 1.75 1.4 6 7.4 2000
F5 1.25 1.2 3 6.6 4000 3
G0 1.06 1.1 1.3 6 10,000
G2 Sun 1 1 1 5.8 12,000
G5 0.92 0.9 0.8 5.5 15,000 9
K0 0.8 0.8 0.4 4.9 20,000
K5 0.69 0.7 0.1 4.1 30,000 14
M0 0.48 0.6 0.02 3.5 75,000
M5 0.2 0.3 0.001 2.8 200,000 73
Spectal
classMass
(sun)Radius
(sun)Volume
(sun radius)Volume
(sun)Average
Density
(sun)
W >40 20 33510.3216 8000 < 0.005
O5 32 18 24429.0245 5832 0.00549
B0 16 7.4 1697.3983 405.224 0.0395
B5 6.5 3.8 229.8473 54.872 0.118
A0 3.2 2.5 65.4498 15.625 0.205
A5 2.1 1.7 20.5795 4.913 0.427
F0 1.75 1.4 11.4940 2.744 0.638
F5 1.25 1.2 7.2382 1.728 0.723
G0 1.06 1.1 5.5753 1.331 0.796
G2 Sun 1 1 4.1888 1 1
G5 0.92 0.9 3.0536 0.729 1.26
K0 0.8 0.8 2.1447 0.512 1.56
K5 0.69 0.7 1.4368 0.343 2.01
M0 0.48 0.6 0.9048 0.216 2.22
M5 0.2 0.3 0.1131 0.027 7.41
Where m is mass, V is volume, and ρ (the Greek letter, rho) is density:
Also remember that in the metric system, density is often given as grams per cubic centimeter (g/cm3),
which is equivalent to grams per milliliter (g/ml).
It is also given as kilograms per cubic meter (kg/m3), which is what I will usually use here.
However, in some sections below where we're dealing with mass in tonnes I will use units that I've invented (though Google reveals unit conversion pages that include it): metric tons per cubic kilometer (tonnes/km3).
ρ = m / V
Similarly, if you need to know how much space will be taken up by a given mass of a given density, then you simply use the formula above:
m = ρ×V
And, of course, if you know the mass and the volume and need to calculate its density, then you simply use the formula above that defines density:
V = m / ρ
ρ = m / V
So for our purposes here we're just going to assume that the only factor affecting changes in volume will be mass loss.
Claimed "rate of shrinkage" of Sun's radius
2.5 feet/hour
0.762 m/hour
7.62×10-4 km/hour
Sun's current radius
695,700 km
Sun's radius one hour from now as claimed
695699.999238 km
Sun's current volume
1.410440010854×1018 km3
Sun's volume one hour from now as claimed
1.410440006219×1018 km3
Sun's volume lost in one hour as claimed
4,634,563,584 km3
3.2859×10-07 %
Mass loss (total)
5.3 million tonnes/sec (5.3×106)
19.08 billion tonnes/hour (19.08×109)
Mass loss (due to fusion)
4.3 million tonnes/sec (4.3×106)
15.48 billion tonnes/hour (15.48×109)
Mass loss (solar wind)
1 million tonnes/sec (1×106)
3.6 billion tonnes/hour (3.6×109)
Average density
1.408 g/cm3
1.408×103 kg/m3
1.408×109 tonnes/km3
Core density
162.2 g/cm3
1.622×105 kg/m3
1.622×1011 tonnes/km3
Photosphere density
2×10-4 kg/m3
200 tonnes/km3
V = m / ρ
m = ρ×V
V = (4/3) × π × R3
Density
TypeDensity
(tonnes/km3)Original Radius
(km)ΔV
(km3)New Radius
(km)ΔR
(km)
Average
1.408×109
695700
13.55
695699.9999999990
0 (effectively)
Core
1.622×1011
695700
0.1176
695699.9999999990
0 (effectively)
Photosphere
200
695700
95.4×106
695699.999984
15.6858×10-6
(15.6858 millimeters)
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Updated on 2019 August 13.