Page:The Urantia Book, 1st Edition.djvu/529

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The internal temperature of many of the suns, even your own, is much higher than is commonly believed. In the interior of a sun practically no whole atoms exist; they are all more or less shattered by the intensive X-ray bombardment which is indigenous to such high temperatures. Regardless of what material elements may appear in the outer layers of a sun, those in the interior are rendered very similar by the dissociative action of the disruptive X rays, X ray is the great leveler of atomic existence.

The surface temperature of your sun is almost 6,000 degrees, but it rapidly increases as the interior is penetrated until it attains the unbelievable height of about 35,000,000 degrees in the central regions. (All of these temperatures refer to your Fahrenheit scale.)

All of these phenomena are indicative of enormous energy expenditure, and the sources of solar energy, named in the order of their importance, are:

Annihilation of atoms and, eventually, of electrons. Transmutation of elements, including the radioactive group of energies thus liberated. The accumulation and transmission of certain universal space-energies. Space matter and meteors which are incessantly diving into the blazing suns. Solar contraction; the cooling and consequent contraction of a sun yields energy and heat sometimes greater than that supplied by space matter. Gravity action at high temperatures transforms certain circuitized power into radiative energies. Recaptive light and other matter which are drawn back into the sun after having left it, together with other energies having extrasolar origin.

There exists a regulating blanket of hot gases (sometimes millions of degrees in temperature) which envelops the suns, and which acts to stabilize heat loss and otherwise prevent hazardous fluctuations of heat dissipation. During the active life of a sun the internal temperature of 35,000,000 degrees remains about the same quite regardless of the progressive fall of the external temperature.

You might try to visualize 35,000,000 degrees of heat, in association with certain gravity pressures, as the electronic boiling point. Under such pressure and at such temperature all atoms are degraded and broken up into their electronic and other ancestral components; even the electrons and other associations of ultimatons may be broken up, but the suns are not able to degrade the ultimatons.

These solar temperatures operate to enormously speed up the ultimatons and the electrons, at least such of the latter as continue to maintain their existence under these conditions. You will realize what high temperature means by way of the acceleration of ultimatonic and electronic activities when you pause to consider that one drop of ordinary water contains over one billion trillions of atoms. This is the energy of more than one hundred horsepower exerted continuously for two years. The total heat now given out by the solar system sun