people think of the sun as some kind of thing on fire but actually it's a nuclear explosion that just keeps exploding
-F
@Felthry I mean, I feel like an explosion is just a fire that doesn't keep going because it blows itself apart...
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@packbat not necessarily, there are explosives that don't involve any form of combustion at all! nuclear explosives among them, but also stuff like nitrogen triiodide which is more just a really violent decomposition than anything you could call fire, or even simpler, a pressure explosion when you overpressurize a pressure vessel
-F
@Felthry okay, yeah, that's a point - the cases we're thinking of are overpressure via chemical reaction
I feel like there's a metaphorical parallel, though, still
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@packbat The main reason we'd say the sun is not a ball of fire is that very little of its energy comes from chemical reactions, it's all nuclear reactions
-F
@Felthry I mean, what we're arguing is that an explosion is when you have a source of energy that causes an expanding ball of fwoom or whatever you call it? And in this case, the fusion is not causing that expansion - it's pretty close to stable.
so, like, a nuclear fire as opposed to a chemical fire, but a fire
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