"Hold a chicken in the air,
Stick a deckchair up your nose..."
Damn. I'm now going to be remembering *that* all night...
Posts by Martin Penny
8 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Aug 2008
OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex
Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job
New SI prefixes clear the way for quettabytes of storage
Room-temperature brown dwarf spied just 9 light-years off
Wednesday 24th August 2011 13:29 GMT
Re: Can anyone enlighten me?
Size, and whether or not hydrogen fusion occurs within it.
Taking some figures from our favourite on-line encyclopaedia, a stellar body needs to have a mass of approximately 8% of that of our Sun for the core pressure and temperature to get high enough for gravity-induced hydrogen fusion to occur; this also tends to "burn" lithium as well.
However, the mass of a sub-stellar body may yet be high enough for other forms of fusion to occur, using "heavy" isotopes of hydrogen - primarily deuterium (hydrogen-2) - and also possibly "burning" lithium, usually when the it is younger and hotter (from gravitation condensation/contraction).
If anyone can correct any mistakes I've made, please do so! :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
