this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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Science

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I'm pretty sure the reason for that is that the sun is actually mostly not hot enough to do nuclear fusion, but has to instead rely on quantum tunnelling. This makes the fusion rate much, much lower. Now while this is good, because otherwise, the sun would burn up far too quickly and kill all of us, it also explains the low power, or energy per time.

Source: Doing my master's in cosmology.