Underground Experiment Confirms Fusion Powers the Sun 141
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have long believed that the power of the sun comes largely from the fusion of protons into helium, but now they can finally prove it (abstract). An international team of researchers using a detector buried deep below the mountains of central Italy has detected neutrinos—ghostly particles that interact only very reluctantly with matter—streaming from the heart of the sun. Other solar neutrinos have been detected before, but these particular ones come from the key proton-proton fusion reaction that is the first part of a chain of reactions that provides 99% of the sun's power.
It's all a matter of energy (Score:5, Informative)
It has been known since the 1960's that the Sun produces energy from fusion, but the actual neutrino's observed then (and until now) were high energy electron neutrinos that actually came from relatively unimportant fusion chains (from the standpoint of energy production), not the proton-proton chain though to produce most of the Sun's energy. Since there was a "neutrino problem" (the Sun appeared to produce only 1/3 of the neutrinos predicted by theory), some people did think that for whatever reason the main energy source - the proton–proton chain reaction - was for some reason mostly shut down, presumably as part of some long period oscillation in the Sun's deep interior (although Arthur C Clarke wrote a novel, "The Songs of Distant Earth," in which it was a permanent shutdown of the Sun's fusion, and a prelude to our Sun going supernova). At that time, the inability to directly see the pp chain seemed like a big deal, but since the discovery of neutrino oscillations (which nicely explain the factor of 1/3), and also with solar interior modeling from helioseismology, there has been a pretty solid consensus that the pp chain was running the Sun, even if there was no direct observation of it.
Now it has been proved. In 1990 that would have been a big deal, but now it is more a matter of just being satisfyingly complete in our observations of the Sun.
Re:The other 1% (Score:4, Informative)
secondary reactions based around contaminants (as in non-H or He atoms).
One is the CNO cycle which is about 0.4% of the total solar energy.
Re:Thought that was obvious... ? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, but we didn't need to detect proton-proton neutrinos to know that fusion powers the sun, because we have myriad other indicators (spectrum, energy output, solar wind) that agree with the current theory. The fact that we have now seen proton-proton neutrinos is cool as hell, but this will never be "proven" significantly more than it currently is, unless science changes drastically to allow for deductive facts. Science allows for an inductive form of "proof" (something being so probable it will likely never be demonstrated wrong) that's less rigorous than the logical kind, and fusion in the Sun has long been under that label. For analogy, we didn't have to wait until Sputnik had orbited Earth to know that Earth was round (since that was known to academics 2000 years earlier), but it certainly made people feel more confident in that fact when it happened.
Science allows for deductive facts to carry scientific weight. I have no idea why you would think it does not.
Science uses both deduction and induction, because while induction is not as absolutely rigorous as deduction, its not possible to deduce the entire cosmos from first principles. One of the axioms of Science is that the universe is not completely random and operates on the basis of rules that govern its behavior, and those rules can be discovered through observation. Universal gravitation is an induction, because there's no way to deduce that gravity operates in the same way everywhere. The presumption is that its highly unlikely that gravity operates the same way in every place we directly measure it, and also operates in a consistent way in every place we can indirectly measure it, but somehow operates differently in every place we just happened to not directly or indirectly observe it.
All logical deduction must start with fixed axioms, and depending on what physical scientific laws you consider strong enough to be axiomatic, you can deduce a lot which is considered scientifically rigorous. For example, when we observe photons striking a detector, we *deduce* they were emitted from somewhere along the path the photon struck the detector. You could argue that's just an induction; that we're only guessing because that's how we've observed photons to behave in the past, but at some point that's sophistry, because it rejects the notion that Scientific reasoning can contain any axioms. Without some reasonable starting point - like being able to trust observations at all - you can't do Science at all.
Also, I doubt there exists any significant number of people who were suddenly more confident the Earth is an oblate spheroid after the launch of Sputnik than before. Nor am I sure how the launch of Sputnik demonstrates the Earth is approximately spherical better than all other demonstrations of that fact prior to Sputnik. Sputnik did not itself observe the Earth, and observers of Sputnik did not get significantly more information from Sputnik in a scientific sense that other observations of Earth's curvature prior to that point.