Yousuf Khan wrote:
granite stone wrote:
I read an article that the moon's force on the mantle might give us
magma and magma is not chemical. In the same way some of the larger
planets may have a pull on our sun's mantle giving us solar
radiation. Since the sun spins every 6 days the spin travels through
the pull on the sun's mantle, energy, huge amounts of it, is given
off. If all stars are suns, you could say each star has planet
pulling on each sun's mantle.

Google Tidal Forces Io and lots come up from NASA.

Uh, where do I start?

First the Moon and Earth's mantle. What you're talking about is tidal
heating. Typically tidal heating is more pronounced when a larger body
tugs on a smaller body, with a big size ratio between them. Your example
of the tidal forces on Saturn's moon, Io, is an example of that. Saturn
pulls on Io's crust and mantle and heats it up, but Io's tidal forces on
Saturn are puny by comparison. Similarly the Moon's tidal forces on
Earth are puny, and don't cause much heating in its mantle or anywhere
else. Earth's tidal forces on the Moon are much more substantial, but
still not substantial enough to create volcanism on the Moon. Most of
Earth's heating comes internally from its own nuclear fission core.
Earth's iron core is suffused with large quantities of uranium.

Since the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth (one side always
faces the Earth), there's not much in the way of tidal heating
going on, as there is little flexure apart from the small amount
due to libration.

The Earth's core itself is unlikely to contain much in the way of
uranium or potassium, they being locked up in siderophobic
compounds distributed thoughout the rest of the bulk of the planet.


The Sun doesn't have a mantle. A mantle is a layer within a solid planet
between the crust and the core of that planet. What one might call a
mantle for the Sun would be its convection layer. The Sun doesn't have a
crust or a mantle, but it does have a core. The core of the Sun is where
nuclear fusion takes place, just like the core of the Earth is where
nuclear fission takes place. The nuclear fuel at the core is the main
source of heat for stars and planets.

Consider also that the total mechanical energy available from the
orbits of all the planets is about 6 x 10^35 Joules. That's what
you could extract if every planet's orbit were to decay due to
tidal friction in the Sun and end up falling in. The Sun produces
about 1.2 x 10^34 Joules/year of energy, so using up all of the
planet's energies would power the Sun for less than 50 years.