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Each day, our Sun appears to rise in the east as our planet rotates at just the right speed, and at just the right axis to sustain life as we know it. Life on Earth is sensitive to relatively small changes in global temperature. A few degrees warmer, the polar ice caps would melt causing sea levels to catastrophically rise; a few degrees colder, another ice age would commence. As some debate whether or not humans can cause climate change, have you ever wondered why, every once and a while, things do not get even just a little out of kilter on the Sun, frying us all in one day? Remarkably, this does not happen. The Sun’s energy output is almost perfectly constant, with a variation of less than one-tenth of one percent (.001). Left unattended, we have no other experience of energy production that remains constant. Even the most expensive car needs a tune-up every once in a while. Or imagine a coal power plant, which requires constant adjustment of the amount of fuel to be burned to maintain a particular output. Yet the Sun appears to self-govern and produce the perfect amount of energy all the time. The Sun’s energy is the result of nuclear fusion—a thermonuclear reaction that changes hydrogen into helium. If we could ever control and contain nuclear fusion on Earth, the energy crisis would be forever over. Our only successful uses of nuclear fusion—as opposed to nuclear fission—are the detonation of thermonuclear weapons. To maintain the perfect output of energy, the Sun converts 700 million metric tons of hydrogen to helium per second. Amazingly, when fusion occurs at the core of the Sun, a particular photon can take hundreds of thousands of years to travel to the surface, where it is finally released as light, and takes an additional eight minutes to travel to Earth. What puzzles me is why the sun doesn’t suddenly start burning 800 million tons per second, or 600 million tons per second. Why does it not act more like the thermonuclear bombs that we are familiar with? What keeps it perfect? The perfect Sun is one of God’s invisible attributes that He has shown and is clearly seen. Tomorrow the Sun will once again appear in the east bringing sunshine and warmth to a cold world.
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