Eats Pudding And Still Has It

Northern Advocate, 19 December 1938, Page 7

Eats Pudding And Still Has It

(Received 10 a.m.)

NEW YORK. December 18,

A solution of the mystery of the fuel which provides the sun with its inexhaustible supply of radiant energy is announced by Professor Hans Bethe, of Cornell University, an exiled German, who was formerly a student of the New Zealand scientist, the late Lord Rutherford. The element is carbon. which is burned on earth as coa\. oil or gas.

It is calculated that ten million billion tons of coal would bo required to generate the heat radiated by the sun within one second. Why. then, it is asked, do not the sun and the stars bui'n up their substance? Dr, Bethe confirms the belief that they utilise the vast atomic energy locked up within the nuclei of atoms. His theory on nucleus collisions, the first to fit the known facts, is that a carbon necleus captures a hydrogen nucleus to form a nitrogen nucleus. The latter is again bombed by hyrdogen nuclei, and finally a helium nucleus is produced, and the original carbon nucleus is regenerated. Thus the sun .eats its carbon, and has it too.