Everyone is taught that our Sun is powered by the Fusion of Hydrogen into Helium. Generally what we are toughed in school seems to be wrong when you dig into the depths of the subject.There are a few obscure researchers that take a completely different view, which is that the Sun is an "Electric Star".
A new paper published this week (25 Aug. 2008) may have lend some support to this concept.
Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance
"Jere H. Jenkins, Ephraim Fischbach, John B. Buncher, John T. Gruenwald, Dennis E. Krause, Joshua J. Mattes (Submitted on 25 Aug 2008)
Abstract: Unexplained periodic fluctuations in the decay rates of Si-32 and Ra-226 have been reported by groups at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Si-32), and at the Physikalisch-Technische-Bundesandstalt in Germany (Ra-226). We show from an analysis of the raw data in these experiments that the observed fluctuations are strongly correlated in time, not only with each other, but also with the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Some implications of these results are also discussed, including the suggestion that discrepancies in published half-life determinations for these and other nuclides may be attributable in part to differences in solar activity during the course of the various experiments, or to seasonal variations in fundamental constants."