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Originally Posted by Torg
Still - if kinetic energy can be considered mass, I have a hard time seeing any large problem in my mass fraction calculations.
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I don't think there was a problem with those, the results were very small. Also, they did not include the gravitational self-energy, which changes the sign of the correction but not its overall magnitude. We have a very small effect here, but it's not zero-- you're right.
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In principle it seems to me that the very largest stars with tremendous luminosities and very high temperatures might have mass fractions of thermal energy higher than 1 in 100,000. I know theres pretty much no practical application to this but its something awesome to think about.
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Agreed, we often forget about relativistic corrections. If you look at it in absolute numbers, the relativistic corrections even for the relatively small mass of the Sun are roughly of order the mass of the whole Earth.