Physical Aspects of the Local Universe

41:8.1In those suns which are en­cir­cuited in the space-en­ergy chan­nels, so­lar en­ergy is lib­er­ated by var­i­ous com­plex nu­clear-re­ac­tion chains, the most com­mon of which is the hy­dro­gen-car­bon-he­lium re­ac­tion. In this meta­mor­pho­sis, car­bon acts as an en­ergy cat­a­lyst since it is in no way ac­tu­ally changed by this pro­cess of con­vert­ing hy­dro­gen into he­lium. Un­der cer­tain con­di­tions of high tem­per­a­ture the hy­dro­gen pen­e­trates the car­bon nu­clei. Since the car­bon can­not hold more than four such pro­tons, when this sat­u­ra­tion state is at­tained, it be­gins to emit pro­tons as fast as new ones ar­rive. In this re­ac­tion the in­go­ing hy­dro­gen par­ti­cles come forth as a he­lium atom.

41:8.2Re­duc­tion of hy­dro­gen con­tent in­creases the lu­mi­nos­ity of a sun. In the suns des­tined to burn out, the height of lu­mi­nos­ity is at­tained at the point of hy­dro­gen ex­haus­tion. Sub­se­quent to this point, bril­liance is main­tained by the re­sul­tant pro­cess of grav­ity con­trac­tion. Even­tu­ally, such a star will be­come a so-called white dwarf, a highly con­densed sphere.

41:8.3In large suns—small cir­cu­lar neb­u­lae—when hy­dro­gen is ex­hausted and grav­ity con­trac­tion en­sues, if such a body is not suf­fi­ciently opaque to re­tain the in­ter­nal pres­sure of sup­port for the outer gas re­gions, then a sud­den col­lapse oc­curs. The grav­ity-elec­tric changes give ori­gin to vast quan­ti­ties of tiny par­ti­cles de­void of elec­tric po­ten­tial, and such par­ti­cles read­ily es­cape from the so­lar in­te­rior, thus bring­ing about the col­lapse of a gi­gan­tic sun within a few days. It was such an em­i­gra­tion of these “run­away par­ti­cles” that oc­ca­sioned the col­lapse of the gi­ant nova of the An­dromeda neb­ula about fifty years ago. This vast stel­lar body col­lapsed in forty min­utes of Uran­tia time.

41:8.4As a rule, the vast ex­tru­sion of mat­ter con­tin­ues to ex­ist about the resid­ual cool­ing sun as ex­ten­sive clouds of neb­u­lar gases. And all this ex­plains the ori­gin of many types of ir­reg­u­lar neb­u­lae, such as the Crab neb­ula, which had its ori­gin about nine hun­dred years ago, and which still ex­hibits the mother sphere as a lone star near the cen­ter of this ir­reg­u­lar neb­u­lar mass.