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criticaltinker | 3 years ago
As far as science is concerned, the jury is still out on stellar nucleosynthesis. The leading theory - that gravitational collapse causes fusion near the core - may be entirely incorrect, and there is mounting evidence suggesting so including a plethora of modern observations that the theory fails to explain.
For example the so-called ‘coronal heating’ problem has existed for 75 years, since the solar corona was first demonstrated to contain plasma with temperatures of 1 million degrees kelvin and above, much higher than the photospheric surface temperature of approximately 6000 K [1].
As another stunning counterexample, current gravitational models do not explain observed properties of the solar wind like spatial variation and periodicity in time (thanks voyager 1 & 2), among many other things.
See [2] for a dense intro to more unresolved problems in solar physics.
Alternative (non mainstream) theories like “plasma cosmology” are gaining traction in the scientific community for this reason. Note though that many papers do not use that particular phrase to describe their work.
Unfortunately (for intellectually curious folks), the contributors to Wikipedia pages on these physics topics are extremely … biased. Reading [3] may leave you with the impression that “plasma cosmology” has been completely debunked by the scientific community, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth ([4][5] are examples to support this claim).
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...
[2] https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/joaa/029/01-02/0003-0...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology
[4] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00159-013-0062-7
[5] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.102...
rayiner|3 years ago