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Originally Posted by rtomes
One further question related to this. Would I be correct in saying that this means that at any moment around 10^-7 of the Sun's mass is actually made up of radiant energy?
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Let's look at that. I'd say that at any time about 1/100 of its internal energy is radiant, but the rest is related to gas pressure at a temperature of about 10 million K, which corresponds to protons moving at 1/1000 of the speed of light. So you have 100 times more energy in the proton motions, and 1 million times more energy in the proton rest mass than in their motions, so yes I get maybe 10
-8 but that's not accurate enough to rule out 10
-7.
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If someone can suggest better words to describe this then that would also be appreciated.
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I think it would be fair to call this the "gravitational mass" of the Sun, for example. We are dropping factors of 2 and so forth right and left, but I think it's fair to say that up to 1 part in 10 or 100 million of the gravity that the Sun produces comes from the radiant energy in there at any moment.