The Sun is Charged!
<p>The Sun is a nuclear reactor made of mostly electrons and protons. Both fluids are heated by nuclear fusion reactions to a central temperature of about fifteen million degrees Kelvin. This creates an immense pressure that, left to its own devices, would have exploded the Sun in a few hours. We owe our existence to gravity. It keeps the Sun bound and maintains life-as-we-know it on Earth.</p>
<p>But here lies a puzzle that I considered in my <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.37.3484" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">first paper</a> on astrophysics 35 years ago. The proton mass is <a href="https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?mpsme=" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">1836 times bigger</a> than the electron mass. This means that gravity acts more strongly on protons than on electrons by a factor of 1836. If the pressure of protons is balanced by gravity, what binds electrons to the Sun?</p>
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