【龙腾网】如果燃烧需要氧气，那么太空中没有氧气，太阳从哪里得到氧气？

正文翻译

If fire needs oxygen, where does the sun get oxygen if there's no oxygen in space? 

如果燃烧需要氧气，那么太空中没有氧气，太阳从哪里得到氧气？

评论翻译

Things emit light because they are hot, not because they are on fire. Fire is just a way to make things get hot. But electricity will work too. If you have an electric stove, or a toaster, you can watch this work as well, notice that the elements start to glow when they get hot. Again, they aren’t on fire, they’re just really hot, so they are radiating visible light.

物体发光是因为它们很热，而不是因为它们着火了。火只是让事情变热的一种方式。但是电力也会起作用。如果你有一个电炉，或者一个烤面包机，你也可以看到这个过程，注意元素开始发光时，他们变热。再说一次，它们并没有着火，它们只是非常热，所以它们辐射着可见光。

Now, what’s another thing that gets really hot and emits light?Ah, the atom bomb.Well, the Sun isn’t on fire, and it isn’t a metal element being heated by electric current. It isn’t even a Fission bomb like the ones used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, we hope, never again. They use Uranium or Plutonium or potentially a number of other very heavy and very rare elements, which split into smaller elements releasing energy.

那么，还有什么东西会变得很热并发出光呢？啊，原子弹。好吧，太阳没有着火，它也不是一种被电流加热的金属元素。它甚至不是广岛和长崎使用的那种裂变原子弹，我们希望永远不会再发生。它们使用铀或钚，或者其他一些非常重和非常稀有的元素，这些元素分裂成更小的元素从而释放能量。

No, it’s a fusion bomb. That uses two atoms, usually in our case Hydrogen, and fuses them together, forming the heavier Helium and releasing energy.Remember how I mentioned there’s lots of Hydrogen in there? Well, that’s handy, because if you press hydrogen together really really really hard, it fuses and boom, ignition, and since there’s lots and lots, the reaction keeps on running for a few billion years. We’re about halfway through the Hydrogen Fusion Explosion that is called the Sun.

不，这是核聚变炸弹。它使用两个原子，通常是氢原子，将它们聚合在一起，形成较重的氦原子，并释放能量。还记得我说过那里有很多氢吗？好吧，这很方便，因为如果你把氢气压在一起真的很硬，它就会聚合，爆炸，点火，因为有很多很多，反应会持续运行几十亿年。我们大概已经完成了氢聚变爆炸的一半，这个爆炸被称为太阳。

at’s just breaking up molecules like O2 and combining the free oxygen atoms with Carbon or Hydrogen or Nitrogen or Iron etc, to make things like ashes, water, nitric oxides, rust. The oxygen still exists, it’s just bound up with those other elements.Fusion turns two bits of hydrogen into one bit of helium. The hydrogen is gone forever, and there was, prior to this, no helium. Nothing just moved around like with mere burning, the elements were fusAnd that makes a lot of heat.

燃烧不会产生或破坏氧气。这仅仅是分解像氧气这样的分子，将游离氧原子与碳、氢、氮、铁等结合，形成灰烬、水、氮氧化物、铁等物质。氧气仍然存在，它只是和其他元素结合在一起。聚变把两个氢原子转变成一个氦原子。氢永远消失了，在此之前，没有氦。没有什么东西像纯粹的燃烧一样四处移动，元素融合在一起。这就产生了大量的热量。

Dave Consiglio
The sun is not fire. Let’s prove it:When we measure the amount of radiation that hits the Earth from the Sun, we find that it’s around 1,000 W per square meter. It’s actually a bit more than that, but I want to keep the numbers simple. As you’ll see, it’ll get us close enough.The Earth is big. Its surface area is 510,000,000,000,000 square meters. When you scale this us, you end up with 125 quadrillion Watts of power striking the surface of the Earth.

太阳不是火，让我们来证明这一点:当我们测量从太阳照射到地球的辐射量时，我们发现每平方米大约有1000瓦。实际上不止这些，但是我想让数字简单一点。你会看到，它会让我们足够接近。地球很大。它的表面积是510,000,000,000,000平方米。当你乘坐这艘船时，你会得到125千万亿瓦特的能量，击中地球表面。

But that’s just the power that hits the Earth! Lots and lots of the Sun’s radiation doesn’t hit the Earth. In fact, more than 99% of the Sun’s radiation doesn’t hit the Earth. If you do the math on how much power the Sun spits out altogether, you get this absolutely ridiculous number:

但那只是击中地球的能量！大量的太阳辐射并没有击中地球。事实上，超过99% 的太阳辐射并没有击中地球。如果你计算一下太阳总共释放了多少能量，你会得到这个绝对荒谬的数字:38460000000000000000000000000w

So the sun can’t be on fire. It must be something different.It’s fusion. Fusion produces billions of times more energy than fire. This allows the sun to shine for millions of times longer. And thus, the sun has lasted 4.5 billion years or so, and will last another 4.5 billion or so before it ceases to fuse.

所以太阳不可能着火，一定是别的什么东西。这是聚合，核聚变产生的能量是火的数十亿倍。这使得太阳的光照时间延长了数百万倍。因此，太阳已经持续了45亿年左右，在它停止聚变之前还将持续45亿年左右。

Early in the Nineteenth Century the most widely accepted answer was that a chemical reaction drove the Sun’s energy output. Knowing the mass of the Sun, and using the most energetic chemical reactions known, it was estimated that the Sun could only burn for about 5000 years. At that time the Earth was thought to be several thousand years old, so this was not thought a problem.

在十九世纪早期，最广为接受的答案是，一种化学反应驱动了太阳的能量输出。了解了太阳的质量，并利用已知的最高能量的化学反应，估计太阳只能燃烧5000年左右。当时人们认为地球有几千年的历史，所以这不是一个问题。

But since the late 1700s geologists had been finding evidence from sedimentary deposits, and the study of sedimentation, that the Earth was much older than that, millions of years, tens of millions, hundreds of millions.

但是从18世纪晚期开始，地质学家们就开始从沉积物中，和沉积物的研究中发现证据，证明地球的历史远远超过那个年代，数百万年，数千万年，数亿年。

In 1862 William Thomson (Lord Kelvin after 1892) provided a new explanation for the Sun’s heat: gravitational contraction. At the current rate of solar output, and the upper limit of its “starting radius” (the orbit of the Earth), he came up with a figure of 20 million years for its age.

1862年，威廉 · 汤姆森(1892年之后的开尔文勋爵)为太阳的热量提供了一个新的解释: 引力收缩。按照目前太阳的发射速率和“起始半径”(地球的轨道)的上限，他得出了2000万年的年龄。

This was compatible with the youngest ages being considered by geologists, and also his own estimate about the age of the Earth based on the time it would take a molten sphere to form its current crust. Thomson’s “age of the Earth” estimate was wildly wrong though because he did not take into account convection inside the core and mantle (also he did not know about radioactive heating, which is an additional factor that also undercuts his model, but this not why his answer was fundamentally wrong - it was wrong even by the physics of the day).

这与地质学家所考虑的最年轻的年龄是一致的，也与他自己根据熔化的球体形成现在的地壳所需的时间对地球年龄的估计是一致的。汤姆森对“地球年龄”的估计是大错特错的，因为他没有考虑到地核和地幔内部的对流(他也不知道放射性加热，这是一个额外的因素，也削弱了他的模型，但这不是为什么他的答案从根本上是错误的——甚至从当时的物理学角度来看也是错误的)。

But the evidence that the Earth was much older than 20 million years kept piling up (a little sedimentation joke). Nothing under some hundreds of millions of years looked plausible, which left the source of energy from the Sun a complete mystery.

但是地球比2000万年前古老得多的证据不断积累。在几亿年的时间里，没有什么东西看起来是可信的，这使得太阳的能量来源完全成为一个谜。

Eddington expanded on this initial insight into his 416 page treatise, also called “The Internal Constitution of Stars” published in 1926. In this remarkable work he derives the structure of stars without knowing the reaction that powered them.

爱丁顿将这个最初的见解扩展到他的416页的论文，也被称为“星星的内部构成” ，出版于1926年。在这项非凡的工作中，他在不知道驱动它们的反应的情况下，就得出了恒星的结构。

Two comments Eddington makes in the books well observed:“We should say that the assemblage of 4 hydrogen nuclei and 2 electrons to form the helium atom was impossible if we did not know that it had occurred.”“We may also await developments of the new quantum mechanics of Heisenberg.”

艾丁顿在书中做了两个评论:“我们应该说，如果我们不知道氦原子的形成过程，4个氢原子核和2个电子的集合是不可能的。”“我们也可能等待海森堡新量子力学的发展。”

It was not until 1937–1938 when Hans Bethe did his Nobel Prize winning work using that “new quantum mechanics”, which worked out the steps of the solar fusion process in two papers. The first detailed the proton-proton chain reaction that provides 16.68% of the Sun’s power. And the second described the main source of solar energy - the CNO (Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen) Cycle which provides 83.32% of the Sun’s power.

直到1937年至1938年，Hans Bethe才使用“新量子力学”完成了他的诺贝尔奖获得者的工作，他在两篇论文中提出了太阳聚变过程的步骤。第一篇详细描述了质子-质子链式反应，它提供了太阳16.68% 的能量。第二个描述了太阳能的主要来源—— CNO (碳-氮-氧)循环，它提供了太阳83.32% 的能量。