Honduras This Week Editorial

For those who are not familiar with the word Catracho, the term is a colloquial and friendly way of referring to a person from Honduras. Nicaraguans are known as Pinoleros or Mucos, Guatemalans are Chapines, Salvadorians Guanacos and the people from Costa Rica are called Ticos.

The newly elected President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega has labeled the Honduran government as a “Bombardment Threat” due to its recent plans to purchase a certain type of surveillance airplane that will be used in the fight against deforestation.

Ortega sustains that in addition to these inoffensive aircrafts, Honduras also has one of the most modern fleets of airplanes in Central America with jets of the magnitude of the F-5.

We believe that during his short time in power, these declarations are the first demonstration of his sympathies for the Chavez, Castro and Morales alliance, bringing back memories of a past when Honduras served as a bridge for actions against the Sandinista government.

We don’t consider Nicaragua’s short range and SAM-7 missiles a threat to our country, and any decision on their partial or total destruction is an entirely autonomous and sovereign decision to be taken by the Nicaraguan government.

In essence, there is no reason to create a hostile climate. We are simply recognizing that the political and functional barriers and divisions between the two countries are being marked all over again.

PLENTY IS KNOWN ABOUT THE SUN

A reader made the stunning asssertion that "no one can explain how our Sun works." Offered below is a short course on solar physics.

Our Sun is a normal main-sequence star, one of more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy, teh Milky Way. Its diameter is 1,390,000 km. Its temperature at the surface is 5,800 Kelvin and 15,600,000 Kelvin at the core. At the center of the core, the Sun's density is more than 150 times that of water. The pressure is 250 billion atmospheres. The Sun is by far the largest object in our solar system. It contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System (Jupiter contains most of the rest). It is often said that the Sun is an "ordinary" star. That's true in the sense that there are many others similar to it. But there are many more smaller stars than larger ones; the Sun is in the top 10% by mass. The median size of stars in our galaxy is probably less than half the mass of the Sun.

The Sun's energy output -- 386 billion billion megawatts -- is produced by nuclear fusion reactions. Each second about 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted to about 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons of energy in the form of gamma rays. As it travels out toward the surface, the energy is continuously absorbed and re-emitted at lower and lower temperatures so that by the time it reaches the surface, it is primarily visible light. For the last 20% of the way to the surface the energy is carried more by convection than by radiation.

The surface of the Sun, called the photosphere, is at a temperature of about 5800 K. Sunspots are "cool" regions, only 3800 K (they look dark only by comparison with the surrounding regions). Sunspots can be very large, as much as 50,000 km in diameter. Sunspots are caused by complicated and not very well understood interactions with the Sun's magnetic field.

A small region known as the chromosphere lies above the photosphere.

The highly rarefied region above the chromosphere, called the corona, extends millions of kilometers into space but is visible only during a total solar eclipse (left). Temperatures in the corona are over 1,000,000 K.

The Sun's magnetic field is very strong (by terrestrial standards) and very complicated. Its magnetosphere (also known as the heliosphere) extends well beyond Pluto.

In addition to heat and light, the Sun also emits a low density stream of charged particles (mostly electrons and protons) known as the solar wind which propagates throughout the solar system at about 450 km/sec. The solar wind and the much higher energy particles ejected by solar flares can have dramatic effects on the Earth ranging from power line surges to radio interference to the beautiful aurora borealis.

The Sun is about 4.5 billion years old. Since its birth it has used up about half of the hydrogen in its core. It will continue to radiate "peacefully" for another 5 billion years or so (although its luminosity will approximately double in that time). But eventually it will run out of hydrogen fuel. It will then be forced into radical changes which, though commonplace by stellar standards, will result in the total destruction of the Earth (and probably the creation of a planetary nebula).

Praying, I'm afraid, will not reverse the evolutionary entropic course of events; and I suspect that "God," as usual, will be not be available for comment.

W. E. Gutman

Los Angeles