Question

Why doesn’t the sun blow itself up?

Answer 1

An explosion occurs when the timescale for the energy release by some process is much shorter than the timescale on which a system can adjust to damp the energy release process. In the present day Sun, nuclear fusion is a very slow process: on average it takes many billion years for a proton to fuse with another. This timescale is quite temperature dependent, so you might have thought the centre of the Sun might heat up quickly, leading to a runaway "explosion". However, an increase in temperature leads to an increase in pressure that would expand the Sun, reducing the core density and temperature and decreasing the rate of nuclear fusion again. The timescale for the Sun to react in this way is just millions of years, so this acts like a thermostat that keeps the reactions under control.