this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
433 points (95.2% liked)

Science Memes

11414 readers
1160 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
433
Oxygen (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
106 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

This is an often misunderstood aspect of the sun. The sun doesn't need to pull oxygen into itself to burn. It just does a bit of fusion magic!

When a star is dense enough it starts to fuse Helium together through a process called the "triple alpha process"; which results in Carbon! From there it's pretty direct for the star to fuse one more Helium to the Carbon via stellar nucleosynthesis to create Oxygen!

So you see, the Sun doesn't need to draw Oxygen from space. It just makes its own!