Like fossil fuels come from organic matter that grew because of the sun. Is there any form of energy on that cannot be traced back to the sun in some way?
Almost.
- Nuclear energy comes from natural materials of the earth that arrived in their current form (it is basically recycled supernova energy from long long ago)
- Geothermal comes ultimately from the gravitational energy of the earth itself compressing and heating it
Literally every other energy source (edit: aside from tidal and some others that people pointed out) is some form of modified and stored sunlight, in some way or another.
Although geothermal could be because of the rotation of the earth compared to its core along with tidal forces.
Although I’m not sure how much of that is from the sun or just in general.
Not sunlight though. Just the sun’s gravitational affect on the earth as well. But nuclear is definitely extrasolar
There is also kinetic energy when objects in space crash into the earth. RIP 🦖🦕
Hypothetically those would average to O as they strike randomly though right?
Well it’s still incoming energy, and it’s a scalar quantity. One could argue that average velocity/momentum incoming from the strikes might be zero, but I don’t think that’s the case either
Geothermal comes ultimately from the gravitational energy of the earth itself compressing and heating it
One thing that’s at least 97-percent certain is that radioactive decay supplies only about half the Earth’s heat. Other sources – primordial heat left over from the planet’s formation, and possibly others as well – must account for the rest.
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2011/07/17/kamland-geoneutrinos/
A surprising amount of geothermal energy comes from radioactive decay. Gravitational binding energy is indeed very large, but much of that heat has already radiated away before a solid crust formed.
But it sounds like, based on other comments, those things are from stars too, right? Like the sun caused the formation of our planet. It also contributes to tidal forces. And radioactive materials also came from other stars if not our own star. Right?
If main sequence stars were candles, supernova would be a nuclear bomb. Elements heavier than iron are only produced in events that are so energetic, the luminosity can exceed that of the entire galaxy they are in. What was a star becomes a neutron star or black hole afrer the supernova. Main sequence stars do not produce heavy elements until they die.
So if you want to say that radionucleotides come from stars, I won’t play semantics police, but that is reductive to the point of missing out on how incredibly unique supernovae are as a stellar phenomenon.
Geothermal, which at this point in geological history mostly comes from decaying radioactive elements. It’s of minor industrial importance, but it fuels undersea vent ecosystems, and does see some use in traditional cultures.
Speaking of radioactive elements, our nuclear generators all run on energy trapped from ancient cosmic catastrophes. Probably colliding neutron stars, for the most part. Hydrogen fusion has been made to happen for research and in atomic bombs - although interestingly we can’t use the same kind as the sun does.
Tidal energy is used for some power generation, and it comes from the kinetic energy left in the Moon, and to a lesser degree the Earth itself, from the formation of the solar system.
Do you have any source for the radioactive decay part? I always thought the Earth was hot inside simply because it hasn’t finished cooking down from when it formed as a ball of molten stuff. Like a hot potato.
Uh, I’ll find one, and edit. It confused the shit out of Victorian scientists, because they had a good guess how old the Earth is from biology, and had thermodynamics, but it was telling them volcanism shouldn’t still be happening.
Edit:
Wikipedia mentions it in the geothermal article, but the source is a textbook, and who has time and/or money for that? There’s also the article on the age of the Earth. Ah, here we go, in the article on Earth’s internal heat budget. Somebody also linked a paper on it elsewhere in this thread.
These give slightly different numbers from each other, but the gist is that radioisotopes (Uranium, Thorium and Potassium being the primordial ones) account for at least half.
Oh interesting. It turns out it’s more like a demonically possesed hot potato, that is still cooling down but also gets warmer from demonic activity under the earth.
kinetic energy left in the moon
Does that mean that one day the moon will stop revolving and we will be tidal locked? If so, does that theoretically happen before the sun consumes us?
It gets both slower and further away (to stay in orbit) every year, by like 2 cm IIRC.
If you could go back a couple billion years it would be huge in the sky. There was even a period, called the Jatulian, where you might not have asphyxiated in the early atmosphere. There wouldn’t be much else to look at, though, and just your skin germs would be futuristic enough to completely change the course of life on Earth, once they get into the environment.
Nuclear (fission) energy did not originate in our sun, it originated in some other sun a long time ago, or potentially a neutron star merger.
Tidal energy originates from gravitational collapse and the conservation of angular momentum when our planet and moon formed, and does not rely on our sun, but similarly originated in the dust clouds that formed our solar system which were put there by some other sun.
Geothermal is a hybrid of these two, with some combination of nuclear decay heating and gravity-driven heating.
Hydrocarbon, wind and hydroelectric all heavily involve our sun somewhere in the process though.
Tides are from the pull of the moon’s gravity. And the moon formed from another body colliding with the Earth. It’s not just due to angular momentum and the moon forming out of cosmic dust like the Earth did.
They said “tidal forces,” not “tides.” Tidal forces refer to the differential of gravitation between two points on an object. It applies in any situation where gravity is a factor, although typically only very large massive objects experience noticeable effects. That said, the concept of spaghettification (objects being stretched out as they approach a black hole’s event horizon) is based on the fact that tidal forces near a black hole would be so enormous they would be observable for even small objects like people.
Everyone is giving you some great answers, but there are since more subtle ones worth mentioning too.
When you take a picture of space, the light from those other stars hits the camera sensor and induces a tiny electrical charge, which is captured, amplified, and analyzed to create the image. Your eyes actually work that way too.
It’s not an energy source as you typically think of it; it never powers anything, but technically it is* energy that exists on Earth that didn’t come from our sun.
That’s awesome. Now that you mention it I remember reading that supermassive black holes are a source of cosmic radiation too.
If it doesn’t have to be energy that’s used as such, there’s more answers.
Neutrinos stream through us each moment at a flux pretty similar to sunlight. Day and night; they sail right through the Earth for the most part. Most of it is from the sun’s core (directly), but some of it is from distant cosmic monsters like supernovae and jets whipping around black holes, and some of it escapes from nuclear reactions on Earth, in particle accelerators and nuclear generators or from decays in nature.
Gravitational waves from distant black hole mergers have been detected on Earth, and they do carry energy.
Meteors hit the Earth, and sometimes they carry enough energy with them to cause damage, like in Chelyabinsk.
You mentioned cosmic rays. The most energetic ones far exceed the energy of anything our accelerators produce, and it’s still a mystery where those unusually powerful ones come from.
Stars give out a lot of electromagnetic energy in the form of radio, microwave, infrared, ultraviolet and x-rays as well as visible light, and probably gamma rays too, although I haven’t heard anything about that one. Many frequencies of light are heavily or even fully absorbed by the upper atmosphere of Earth, which is part of what makes space telescopes necessary.
Lighting strikes on Jupiter are very noticeable as noise on some radio bands. I’m not actually sure how much of the wind that powers that is the Jupiter equivalent of geothermal, and how much is ultimately from sunlight. I’m guessing it skews to the latter, though.
Tidal.
Gravitational interaction between the Moon and Earth orbiting each other and the Sun …
Moon/Earth were formed within the influence of the Sun and the solar system.
Unless a giant comet ( attracted by Sun’s larger gravity well?? ) introduced something extra-solar , almost everything is under the influence of the Sun.
