Spacious hydrogen clouds, involved in the star-forming seat, provide extremely intense
thermonuclear reactions and yield enough energy to form huge stellar cluster.
The ITER experiment aims to produce the world's first "burning plasma," in which
thermonuclear reactions will produce net energy for the first time (with a projected amplification factor of ten).
The tiny bits of unused mass left over from these
thermonuclear reactions become starlight via the most famous formula in physics, Einstein's E = [mc.sup.2].
The energy released by these
thermonuclear reactions generates an outward pressure that counterbalances the star's tendency to collapse under its own weight.
By sparking
thermonuclear reactions, a machine simply called Z has joined the big leagues among potential technologies for producing power from controlled nuclear fusion.
An iron core is surrounded by concentric shells of successively lighter elements, each created in bouts of
thermonuclear reactions that kept the star alive.
The calculations that go into predicting the light-element abundances resulting from an epoch when the universe was sufficiently hot and dense to drive
thermonuclear reactions also yield limits on the number of different types of neutrinos that may exist.
If one of these dense stellar remnants accretes enough mass from a binary companion to push it over the edge,
thermonuclear reactions deep within its interior blow up the entire star as a Type Ia supernova.
