Exhilaration, Nervousness and Heartbreak. All felt in one masterpiece. Avenger’s Endgame. As exciting as it was, we were all left in misery once Tony Stark’s eyes were closed forever - the end of iron man.
Figure 1: I am Iron Man
Iron man has been the star in Marvel (yes there are other stars but he is THE star) - after all, he did start the marvel universe. As a character he has everything - wit, sarcasm, arrogance and bravery. He’s made himself so compelling that kids and even adults believe Iron Man could exist in real life. It’s just a metal suit shooting lasers. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Despite making it look easy and believable, I guarantee you it is the complete opposite. Now I know, to many of you, it seems so simple because he basically made his arc reactor in a prison and obviously if some scientific words/phrases are thrown at you, you’d end up thinking the impossible is possible.
Figure 2: Tony Stark building the arc reactor
The arc reactor that he harnessed in the prison has yet to be achieved by real world scientists, and we’ve been at this for over 80 years. Tony created an arc reactor that basically mimics a star - not just the way it looks but also the energy inside. Except he made this ‘star’ here on Earth, and harnessed its power within a metal suit. . . Let that sink in a bit. A star on Earth. Not outside, not out in the galaxy somewhere, but right next to us.
Creating a star is one thing, but successfully harnessing its energy like Tony Stark does is next-level complex. Don’t get me wrong though, I still love the character and it’s fascinating to see Iron Man on the big screens - it’s just that the process portrayed isn’t really that simple..
Okay now getting back to my main point. Let me first explain to you how the Sun produces energy. For this production of energy, the sun uses a process called nuclear fusion. As the name “fusion” suggests, it focuses on the merging of two items. So now from common sense, if two items are combined to form one, the new item formed will be heavier. In fusion, although the new item is heavier, it isn’t heavier than the combination of the starting items - just heavier than each individual item. Once these items are fused together, energy is released. In the case of the Sun - a lot of energy. A LOT.
Figure 3: Energy loss of two masses ’fusing’
From a physics point-of-view, in a fusion reaction, two lighter nuclei merge to form a single heavier nucleus. The process releases energy because the total mass of the resulting single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei - what I said before but now these ’items’ are nuclei. As you can see in the very beautiful diagram above, the two nuclei fusing together form a heavier nucleus, however, there is a loss in total mass. This loss in mass accounts for the large amount of energy released. Now, even if the change in mass is not significant, the energy released would still be great - remember Einstein’s famous equation E = Mc^2 (M = mass; c = speed of light)? To remind you again, the speed of light is 3 × 10^8m/s. And remember it’s c^2, so the speed of light is multiplied by itself. I don’t need to tell you how big of a number that is. Well, actually it’s -
9 × 10^16m/s.... So from the diagram above, 3g = 0.003kg. With this, the energy released would be 2.7×10^14 joules just for a loss of 3g.
Now, understanding what has been said so far, let me go to a bit more detail. In the core of the Sun, hydrogen nuclei combine together to form helium. In the process, a small amount of mass (just under one per cent) is released as energy, and this makes its way to the Sun’s surface before beaming out into space. However, this fusion reaction is done about millions and millions of time per second which leads to a tremendous amount of energy being released.
So whatever the sun’s doing, Tony Stark created it in prison... Obviously to a smaller scale but this ’smaller scale’ is still extremely difficult to achieve. To put in simpler terms - Real life Iron Man = real life Sun