What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 2: Kelvin and Helmholtz at the Ready

June 16, 2026 Universe Today

What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 2: Kelvin and Helmholtz at the Ready
By Paul Sutter (https://ift.tt/tONEGS1)

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, whose famously wrong answer for the Sun's age turns out to be exactly the calculation we need. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

How can the Sun keep shining with its furnace switched off? Two nineteenth-century aristocrats, Helmholtz and Lord Kelvin, worked out the answer mostly by accident. It comes down to stored heat, gravitational shrinking, and the strange self-regulating thermostat of hydrostatic equilibrium.

June 17, 2026 at 12:33AM
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