• One Source or Many?
• Layer One: The Deep Core
• Layer Two: The Molten Middle
• Layer Three: Spallation — The Cosmic Bullet Effect
• Layer Four: Nuclear Reactions in Liquid Metal — Beyond the Lattice
• Does Melting Actually Help? The Coulomb Barrier in Liquid Metal
• Transmutations: Turning One Element Into Another
• Layer Five: The Boiling Surface
• Layer Six: The Plasma Atmosphere
• Putting It All Together
• Why This Matters
  • About the Author

More Power Sources Than We Thought

A science article exploring the many ways the Sun generates energy

§One Source or Many?

Most of us were taught that the Sun runs on one thing: hydrogen fusion deep in the core. That has been the official answer for about a century. But a growing number of researchers think the real picture is far more complicated — and that hydrogen fusion, while possibly a real contributor, may be just one item in a much longer list.

Think of the Sun not as a simple furnace with one dial, but as a complex machine with dozens of energy sources running at the same time — each one doing its part in a different layer, at a different temperature, through a different process. Scientists call this kind of accounting an energy catalog. What follows is the most complete catalog we can build today.

§Layer One: The Deep Core

At the very center of the Sun, the pressure is almost unimaginable — far beyond anything we can recreate in a laboratory. How hot is it? That depends on which model you trust, and no probe has ever reached the solar core directly. The standard scientific model predicts temperatures of around 15 million degrees Celsius, but that number is calculated by working backward from the assumption that hydrogen fusion is the primary energy source — not measured directly. If the core is instead a dense liquid of iron, nickel, and rock compressed under enormous gravity — more like the inside of a super-sized Earth than a ball of hot gas — then the temperature would be set by completely different physics, and the number would be different too.

What we can say confidently is that the core is under crushing pressure and generates enormous heat through several well-understood processes.

Radioactive decay is one of the most important. Elements like uranium, thorium, and potassium-40 are naturally unstable. Over millions and billions of years, their atoms slowly break apart — a process called decay — and release heat as they do. Earth generates about 20 trillion watts this way. Scaled to the Sun’s much greater mass, this becomes a substantial and largely overlooked contribution to the total energy budget.

Gravitational compression is powerful and certain. Gravity constantly squeezes the entire body of the Sun inward. All that squeezing generates heat — the same reason a bicycle pump gets warm when you push the handle. This was actually the leading theory for solar energy before fusion was proposed, put forward by Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz in the 1800s. It remains a real and continuous energy source regardless of which other processes are also happening.

Gravitational differentiation adds more. Heavy elements — iron and nickel especially — slowly sink toward the center under gravity while lighter materials rise. This is the same process that shaped Earth’s layered interior. Moving downward through a liquid releases gravitational energy as heat, like a slow-motion waterfall made of liquid metal. In a body as massive as the Sun, this ongoing settling releases significant energy.

Electrochemical heating from the liquid metal dynamo also operates here. The movement of conducting liquid iron and nickel generates electric currents, and those currents encounter resistance — which produces heat, the same way a wire heats up when electricity flows through it. Earth’s outer core works exactly this way, and it is what generates our planet’s magnetic field.

What about hydrogen fusion? The standard model places it at the core, but there is a problem with that picture. Hydrogen is the lightest element — in a liquid body sorted by density, it would rise toward the surface, not sink to the center. For hydrogen to stay deep in the core it would have to be chemically locked into a compound, like iron hydride or water, that is heavy enough to stay down. As a free gas it simply would not be there. This suggests that if hydrogen fusion happens at all, it is more likely occurring near the surface or in the lower plasma atmosphere — where hydrogen is actually abundant, continuously delivered by outgassing and chemical breakdown from the liquid body below.

§Layer Two: The Molten Middle

Above the deep core sits a thick zone of molten material — liquid rock and metal, similar to what you would find deep inside the Earth. Here, an entirely different class of energy sources takes over: chemistry.

Chemical reactions between elements release enormous amounts of energy. When aluminum meets oxygen and combines to form aluminum oxide, it releases about 1,670 kilojoules of energy per mole — one of the highest energy releases in all of basic chemistry. Magnesium, silicon, calcium, and iron do similar things, and the energy adds up quickly.

Electrochemical reactions occur wherever two different liquid metals or minerals come into contact. These natural boundaries act like batteries, producing electric current and releasing energy continuously. The Sun’s interior, with its wild mixture of iron, nickel, silicon, and dozens of other materials all tumbling together, would be full of these natural battery junctions.

Catalytic reactions are accelerated by nickel and iron, which are among the most powerful natural catalysts known — meaning they speed up chemical reactions happening around them without being used up themselves. Wherever liquid nickel or iron pool near the surface, they supercharge the chemistry nearby, potentially multiplying the energy output of reactions that would otherwise be slow.

§Layer Three: Spallation — The Cosmic Bullet Effect

Here is one that rarely appears in textbooks. The Sun is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays — incredibly high-energy particles flying in from deep space at nearly the speed of light. When these fast-moving particles slam into atoms inside the Sun, they shatter those atoms apart like a wrecking ball hitting a brick wall. This process is called spallation.

Spallation does several things at once. First, it releases energy directly from the collision. Second, it creates entirely new elements that would not have formed any other way. Lithium, beryllium, and boron — three light elements that are very hard to explain through ordinary fusion — are produced in significant quantities by spallation. Scientists have confirmed that most of the lithium, beryllium, and boron in our solar system was made this way.

During solar flares, the Sun also produces its own high-energy particles, which then cause spallation reactions inside the Sun itself. Gamma-ray telescopes have detected the signature radiation from these internal spallation events. It is not the largest item in the energy catalog, but it is real, it is measured, and it creates elements — a remarkable side effect.

§Layer Four: Nuclear Reactions in Liquid Metal — Beyond the Lattice

This is where things get controversial — and exciting.

LENR stands for Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. The standard explanation in laboratory experiments is that when hydrogen or its heavier cousin deuterium is packed tightly into a solid metal lattice — the rigid crystalline structure of metals like nickel or palladium — the atoms are forced into such close contact, and the surrounding electrons behave so unusually, that nuclear reactions can occur at surprisingly low temperatures. Instead of needing millions of degrees, the metal structure does the work of pushing atoms together.

This has been called “cold fusion” by some, though researchers prefer the careful term LENR. It has had a rocky history — the famous 1989 Fleischmann-Pons announcement was disputed and controversial. But research has quietly continued for decades, and the results have become harder to dismiss.

NASA took it seriously enough to publish peer-reviewed results in 2020. A team at NASA’s Glenn Research Center triggered nuclear fusion reactions inside metal samples loaded with deuterium at room temperature — with fuel densities exceeding those of massive billion-dollar fusion reactors. Their results appeared in Physical Review C, the leading nuclear physics journal.

But here is a question the standard lattice explanation cannot easily answer: what happens when the metal is molten?

A true crystalline lattice does not survive melting. Liquid metals have no long-range ordered structure. By the standard LENR explanation, melting a metal should shut the reaction down entirely — the confinement geometry is gone. And yet, one of the most consistent observations across LENR experiments is the appearance of microscopic molten regions — tiny melted spots, micro-craters, and fused surface features in the metal after reactions occur. The standard explanation treats these as byproducts of the reaction. But that raises an uncomfortable question: if the lattice is the mechanism, why does melting keep showing up as a signature?

This suggests something important may be happening specifically in or at the boundary of molten metal — not just in the solid lattice. Nobody has yet run a systematic LENR experiment using intentionally fully molten metals. That gap in the literature is significant, and it is directly relevant to the Sun, whose surface is a churning liquid of iron and nickel, not a solid crystal.

§Does Melting Actually Help? The Coulomb Barrier in Liquid Metal

To understand why liquid metal might be special, we need to understand the Coulomb barrier — the main obstacle to nuclear reactions at low energies.

Every atomic nucleus carries a positive electric charge. When two nuclei approach each other, their positive charges push back against each other — like trying to press two magnets together at the same pole. To get close enough for nuclear forces to take over and a reaction to occur, you normally need enormous energy to overcome this repulsion. That energy requirement is called the Coulomb barrier.

The key insight is that surrounding electrons can lower that barrier by clustering around the positive nuclei and partially canceling out their repulsive charge. This is called electron screening, and it is well established in physics.

What researchers did not fully expect is how dramatically the environment changes the screening effect — and the experimental results have been deeply puzzling to theorists.

In gas targets, electron screening is weak — the enhancement of nuclear reaction rates is small and matches theoretical predictions well, with screening potentials around 25–30 electron volts (eV).

In solid metal targets, the effect is roughly ten times larger than theory predicts. Multiple research groups bombarding deuterium-loaded metal targets with low-energy deuterons — including aluminum, zirconium, tantalum, and palladium — consistently measured screening potentials of 300 to over 600 eV, far beyond what any standard model could explain. The Journal of Physics Society of Japan, Europhysics Letters, and Physical Review C have all published these anomalous results. The screening energy measured in tantalum reached 340 eV against a theoretical prediction of around 28 eV. In palladium oxide, Kasagi and colleagues at Tohoku University measured screening potentials of 600 eV or more.

In liquid metal targets, the effect appears to be even larger still. A 2015 theoretical and experimental study examined nuclear fusion cross-sections in liquid lithium, indium, and mercury. It found that fusion cross-sections in liquid metal targets are significantly higher than in the same metals in solid form — and higher still than in gas targets. The measured screening potential difference between liquid and solid lithium was approximately 235 eV. The researchers proposed that the disordered, flowing structure of liquid metal — which lacks a fixed lattice but maintains a highly dynamic electron environment — actually enhances nuclear screening beyond what a rigid solid can provide.

This is a remarkable and underappreciated result. It means that melting a metal does not shut down nuclear screening enhancement — it may actually increase it.

The physical reason is not fully understood, but the leading idea involves the way electrons in liquid metals behave differently from those in solids. In a liquid, electrons are more mobile, more correlated in their motion, and respond collectively to nearby nuclei in ways that solid-state models do not capture. The result is a more effective electron cloud around each nucleus, lowering the Coulomb barrier further than a solid lattice can.

For the Sun, this matters enormously. The solar surface is not a solid lattice — it is a turbulent, churning liquid of iron, nickel, silicon, and dozens of other metals, continuously bathed in plasma and subjected to violent arc discharge. If liquid metals already enhance nuclear screening beyond solid metals under laboratory conditions, the solar surface — with its additional plasma environment, intense electromagnetic activity, and extreme pressures — represents conditions where Coulomb barrier reduction could be far more dramatic than anything yet measured in a laboratory. The SAFIRE experiments, which ran a liquid-metal-adjacent anode under plasma bombardment and produced anomalous energy output, may have already been brushing against this phenomenon without recognizing it.

We propose calling this mechanism liquid-phase nuclear catalysis — nuclear reactions facilitated not by a rigid crystal lattice but by the collective electron behavior of a conducting liquid metal in contact with plasma. It is not cold fusion in the traditional sense. It is something the experimental literature has been approaching from the edges for decades without yet naming directly.

§Transmutations: Turning One Element Into Another

The most dramatic evidence from LENR-type experiments is not just the heat — it is the fact that elements actually change.

Nickel transforms into copper. Palladium transforms into silver. Cesium transforms into praseodymium. These are not contamination errors — multiple independent laboratories have confirmed them under controlled conditions.

The Iwamura group at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries documented cesium-to-praseodymium transmutation repeatedly. Researchers at Osaka University independently confirmed their results. In 2013, Toyota’s Central Research and Development Laboratories replicated the findings. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Materials documented that plasma interaction with nickel foil produced entirely new elements — including lithium, aluminum, and calcium — on the surface where they had not been before. NASA’s own lattice confinement experiments found unexpected elements including iron and copper in post-test analysis of palladium-silver alloy samples.

If liquid-phase nuclear catalysis operates on the Sun’s iron-nickel surface — continuously, over billions of years, under plasma bombardment and arc discharge — the transmutation of elements at the solar surface is not just possible. It may be one of the primary mechanisms shaping the Sun’s elemental composition over time. The Sun’s spectral fingerprint, with its surprising abundances of certain elements, may be partly a record of billions of years of quiet transmutation at the liquid-plasma boundary, not just the inherited composition of the original solar nebula.

§Layer Five: The Boiling Surface

The surface of the Sun is not a calm, clean boundary. It is a churning, erupting, electrically active zone spinning at nearly 2 kilometers per second. The rotation — combined with violent chemistry below — keeps all materials constantly mixing. Heavy elements are dragged upward, react explosively, and some evaporate off the surface into the plasma atmosphere above.

Chemical reactions at the surface include the formation and breakdown of sulfur compounds, hydrogen compounds, halides (compounds involving fluorine and chlorine), and oxides of every heavy metal present. These reactions release energy and also act as the delivery mechanism for getting heavy elements like iron, silicon, and nickel from the liquid body into the atmosphere — essentially the same chemistry seen in volcanic fumaroles on Earth.

Electrochemical arc discharge is what produces the Sun’s most dramatic surface features. Every spicule — a narrow jet of plasma shooting upward from the surface at 20 km/s — appears to be a natural arc discharge, like a lightning bolt pointing straight into space. With about 3 million spicules firing at any moment, the combined energy delivered to the corona above is more than enough to explain why the outer atmosphere reaches over one million degrees.

§Layer Six: The Plasma Atmosphere

Above the surface, the Sun’s outer atmosphere — the corona — is full of its own energy sources.

Ion acceleration through double layers — electrical boundaries in the plasma — accelerates heavy ions (iron, nickel, silicon) to enormous speeds. This is what the SAFIRE laboratory experiments confirmed: a metal ball surrounded by plasma naturally organizes itself into glowing shells, accelerating ions outward at ballistic speeds. The energy output measured was surprisingly high relative to the energy put in. At solar scale, with millions of these discharge events happening constantly, the corona is heated to temperatures far above the surface below — something the standard model has never been able to fully explain.

Magnetic reconnection releases stored magnetic energy explosively during solar flares. A large flare can release as much energy as billions of nuclear bombs in a matter of minutes.

Coronal rain completes the return cycle. Heavy elements — iron, magnesium, silicon — rise into the corona, radiate energy as they cool, condense into droplets, and fall back down to the surface. Scientists confirmed in 2025 that this rain is triggered specifically by the enrichment of these heavy elements at the tops of coronal loops. It is a continuous recycling loop that moves energy and matter between the surface and the atmosphere above.

§Putting It All Together

Here is the full energy catalog as we understand it today:

| Source | Layer | Status |

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§Why This Matters

The traditional picture treats hydrogen fusion at the core as the one and only answer to “how does the Sun shine?” But when you examine that assumption carefully, it runs into real problems — starting with the simple fact that hydrogen, as the lightest element, would rise to the surface of a liquid body rather than concentrate at the center. The evidence increasingly suggests the Sun is more like a city’s power grid than a single power plant — many sources, running in parallel, each contributing to the total.

Understanding the full energy catalog changes how we think about stars in general. If planets and stars share the same ingredients and the same physical processes — just at different scales and temperatures — then every rocky planet, every gas giant, every glowing star might be running versions of the same catalog of reactions. The Sun is not a special, unique furnace. It may be the best-studied example of a universal process.

And some of the items in that catalog — especially LENR and transmutation — are already being studied for use here on Earth. If the Sun has been quietly running low-energy nuclear reactions in its nickel-iron surface for billions of years, that is not just a curiosity. It is a blueprint.

This article is part of the ongoing Liquid Star series exploring alternative perspectives on stellar structure, planetary formation, and energy generation._

§About the Author

Adolfo Maldonado is an independent researcher and author developing the Liquid Star Model.