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The great neon sign in the sky

What do Las Vegas and the Sun have in common? Answer: an apparent abundance of neon. A new study suggests that neon, the fifth-most-common element in the cosmos, is as much as three times more abundant in the Sun than astrophysicists had previously thought.

The astrophysical model of how the Sun works has been at odds with observation for the past couple of years. At issue is the depth of the Sun's convection zone, a 125,000-mile-thick layer of roiling gases that helps transmit energy from the Sun's core to its surface. The model relies on an assumed mix of carbon, neon, nitrogen, and oxygen within the zone to predict one depth, whereas the data suggest another depth. Some investigators have noted that tripling the neon that the model assumes in the mix would resolve the discrepancy.

But measuring the Sun's neon content is tricky. So Jeremy J. Drake of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Paola Testa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology turned to its neighbors. They analyzed data from NASA's earth-orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory for twenty-one sunlike stars within 400 light-years of Earth. On average, they found, the ratio of neon to oxygen in each star is three times what is predicted for the Sun. If the Sun is anything like its neighbors--and astrophysicists think it is--it should have triple the neon previously thought. Astrophysicists can keep their theory about how the Sun works. And the casinos in Las Vegas can rest assured there's enough neon to power the glow of their signs indefinitely. (Nature 436: 525-28, 2005)

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