From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jul 21 2002 - 05:17:19 MDT
Don't blame me:
===============
University of Missouri-Rolla 17-Jul-02
Sun Is Made of Iron, Not Hydrogen
Library: SCI Keywords: ASTRONOMY ASTROPHYSICS SOLAR SYSTEM SUN PHYSICS
CHEMISTRY MO Description: For years, scientists have assumed that the sun
is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a poster presentation to be
delivered July 21-26 at the Meteoritical Society's annual meeting in Los
Angeles, Dr. Oliver Manuel says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most
abundant element. (Meteoritical Society, Jul-2002)
Contact: Andrew Careaga Phone: 573-341-4328 E-mail: acareaga@umr.edu
SUN IS MADE OF IRON, NOT HYDROGEN, PROFESSOR SAYS
For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of
hydrogen. But in a poster presentation to be delivered July 21-26 at the
Meteoritical Society's annual meeting in Los Angeles, Dr. Oliver Manuel
says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element.
Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at the University of
Missouri-Rolla, claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat,
as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface.
But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova that
continues to generate energy within the iron-rich interior of the sun,
Manuel says.
"We think that the solar system came from a single star, and the sun formed
on a collapsed supernova core," Manuel says. "The inner planets are made
mostly of matter produced in the inner part of that star, and the outer
planets of material form the outer layers of that star."
Manuel will present his the evidence for his assertion in his poster
presentation, "Why the Model of a Hydrogen-filled Sun is Obsolete." His
presentation will be Monday, July 21, at the Meteoritical Society's 65th
annual meeting on the University of California-Los Angeles campus.
Co-authors with Manuel are Cynthia Bolon, a Ph.D. student in chemistry at
UMR, and Aditya Katragada, a UMR graduate student in chemistry.
Manuel says the solar system was born catastrophically out of a supernova
-- a theory that goes against the widely-held belief among astrophysicists
that the sun and planets were formed 4.5 billion years ago in a relatively
ambiguous cloud of interstellar dust.
Iron and the heavy element known as xenon are at the center of Manuel's
efforts to change the way people think about the solar system's origins.
Manuel believes a supernova rocked our area of the Milky Way galaxy some
five billion years ago, giving birth to all the heavenly bodies that
populate the solar system. Analyses of meteorites reveal that all
primordial helium is accompanied by "strange xenon," he says, adding that
both helium and strange xenon came from the outer layer of the supernova
that created the solar system. Helium and strange xenon are also seen
together in Jupiter.
Manuel has spent the better part of his 40-year scientific career trying to
convince others of his hypothesis. Back in 1975, Manuel and another UMR
researcher, Dr. Dwarka Das Sabu, first proposed that the solar system
formed from the debris of a spinning star that exploded as a supernova.
They based their claim on studies of meteorites and moon samples which
showed traces of strange xenon.
Data from NASA's Galileo probe of Jupiter's helium-rich atmosphere in 1996
reveals traces of strange xenon gases -- solid evidence against the
conventional model of the solar system's creation, Manuel says.
Manuel first began to develop the iron-rich sun theory in 1972. That year,
Manual and his colleagues reported in the British journal Nature that the
xenon found in primitive meteorites was a mixture of strange and normal
xenon (Nature 240, 99-101).
The strange xenon is enriched in isotopes that are made when a supernova
explodes, the researchers reported, and could not be produced within
meteorites.
Three years later, Manuel and Sabu found that all of the primordial helium
in meteorites is trapped in the same sites that trapped strange xenon.
Based on these findings, they concluded that the solar system formed
directly from the debris of a single supernova, and the sun formed on the
supernova's collapsed core. Giant planets like Jupiter grew from material
in the outer part of the supernova, while Earth and the inner planets
formed out of material from the supernova's interior.
This is why the outer planets consist mostly of hydrogen, helium and other
light elements, and the inner planets are made of heavier elements like
iron, sulfur and silicon, Manuel says.
Strange xenon came from the helium-rich outer layers of the supernova,
while normal xenon came from its interior. There was no helium in the
interior because nuclear fusion reactions there changed the helium into the
heavier elements, Manuel says.
In January, Manuel presented similar findings at the American Astronomical
Society's meeting in Washington, D.C. His paper, "The Origin of the Solar
System with an Iron-rich Sun," and other information about Manuel's
research are available on the Internet at http://web.umr.edu/~om/.
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