What is the ratio of nuclear to gravitational energy for the sun during its whole life cycle?

David,
I was starting to read “Submillimetre Astronomy” by Watt and Webster and they were talking about molecular clouds. They mention the magnetic energy density being approximately equal to the kinetic energy density, then talked about a cascade of scales.  It has been on my mind to check how much nuclear energy in generated in galaxies. But I am tired today and could only think of the sun. The “inflation” of that energy has to go somewhere.

Your page about the end of the sun seems to have all the steps, in fairly realistic form, for the life and fate of the sun.

https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/infocom/The%20Website/end.html

The pages that say, “the sun will live 9 or 10 billions years just like it is today and then die” stop their calculation there.
But your chart of luminosities has no total.  And I don’t see a check on the mass of elements in sun.
Can you just tell me the ratio of nuclear energy generated in a lifetime for a star, and its gravitational energy?
Now the question I was really aiming for was, how much of the nuclear kinetic energy of stars is converted back into kinetic or magnetic or other forms of energy?  I just cannot believe in magical inflation, nor magical dark energy. But I can easily imagine merging galaxies, large accumulations of dense stars too dim to see, enormous magnetic field and charge currents in space, and cold matter filling most of the universe that has little or no apparent hydrogen.  Or just rather ordinary nuclear energy getting back into the body of a galaxy.  Including neutrinos that seem to stop conveniently in every odd detector these days (I am really tired, ignore my poking fun.  Some good friends are neutrino astronomers.  I try to help them too.

Don’t let my idle images get in the way.  Can you tell me how much all that energy in your diagram adds up too?

If you really want to “share” on the Internet, you might consider letting people download your data in a tab separated file with a simple ascii header.  If you go hog wild, you could put all your calculations in a calculator or simulation, expose the parameters and assumptions, and let people play with it.  If there is ‘beyond hog wild”, that might be something like getting all the astronomers and related groups in the world to share their equations, data, models, algorithms – where they can be used by any of the 7.9 Billion people in the world, particularly the 2 Billion first time learners from 5 to 21.  I think Gaia counted the types of stars, and all of them have a nuclear life cycle,  If I had to guess, i would say that the ratio of their nuclear to gravitational energy is about 20.
Eyeballing it, there are 12 billion year at 1.25 times our luminosity, and 0.3 billion at 100 times.  Say roughly 40 billion of todays solar years of output.  I found (3/5) GM^2/R for gravitational energy about 2.3E41 Joules.  And somewhere about 3.86E26 * 40 * 1E9 * 365.25 * 86400 = 4.87E44 Joules for a ratio of nuclear to gravitational energy of 2118.

For 24 years, every day, I have reviewed topics and groups on the Internet.  I took over the InternetFoundation.Org from Network Solutions in July 1998 after the original Internet Foundation was cancelled.  The people at NS told me that Al Gore diverted the money for the Internet Foundation ($15 per year per domain) to put Internet into American neighborhoods. The US Attorney General rules that illegal and they cancelled it, rather than fixing it. With 400 Million active domains, that is about $6 Billion a year.  I get none and still try to do the same job. And when I am too exhausted to do real work, I wonder how to convince groups on the Internet to work together.  Wikipedia does a terrible job. They don’t even number their equations, give no calculations or data or tools.  And rewrite perfectly correct things in faddish obscure form by the latest author, no one checks.  I tried to get the owners of Mathematica, MatLab, Maple and others to donate their symbolic math skills to help, but they only want more money and power and market share.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_luminosity – 3.828E26

Richard K Collins

About: Richard K Collins

Director, The Internet Foundation Studying formation and optimized collaboration of global communities. Applying the Internet to solve global problems and build sustainable communities. Internet policies, standards and best practices.


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