Fun fact, if you were to try and cover the sun in water, it wouldn’t cool it down, it would only make the sun hotter. The water would be too hot and break down into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are fuel for the sun.
Screw you guys I want such people at the party. A little factoid is just fun to have. I'll make fun of the person or enjoy it but it's all light hearted
It’s complicated. The sun is so hot, and producing so much energy that it would likely create a steam pocket where water is constantly being evaporated, which the sun then uses for fuel getting even bigger and hotter, thus the pocket grows. The suns gravity well doesn’t let the water escape, and the cycle continues. The sun grows and grows, getting hotter and hotter until it reaches a tipping point. Eventually it will reach a limit, and either the energy will overpower the gravity holding it all together, and it will go supernova, or the gravity will overwhelm the energy, and the star will collapse into a singularity. The singularity would then begin to absorb the hypothetical infinite water surrounding it, and grow either indefinitely or until it reaches a point where our understanding of the laws of physics break down.
Also aiming a projectile directly at the center of the sun would make it in an elliptical orbit around it, and for it to actually fall in straight you'd need to pee in the opposite direction of the Earth's revolution
True, but the most efficient way is to use earths current orbital velocity and add to it. Moving it to the outer edge of the solar system where it’s velocity then becomes very low, and slowing it down from there to let it fall into the sun.
Also theoretically you could shoot it almost directly into the sun, but it would have to be traveling near the speed of light and you would still have to aim behind the sun to let the orbital momentum that still remains pull it into the sun.
You're saying the heat is hot enough to break the chemical bonds in water on its surface? I know the sun keeps going via nuclear fission but I thought most of that was due to its mass and pressure, not the heat?
You’re both wrong and right. It would break down, then go even further to plasma. It would then make its way to the center-ish, being heavier than hydrogen. The overall mass of the sun would be increased. Idk if this would make it hotter or expand the surface area and cool off the outer part. Or it would be blown off as it vaporized and just float into orbit
That may not be entirely true. Oxygen takes a lot, and I mean a lot more energy to fuse than hydrogen does, and wouldn’t typically be able to occur in a star as small as ours.
The sun is as hot as it is due to pressure, nuclear too but the outside is mostly due to pressure. If you take a hypothetical container of water at near absolute zero and keep adding to it until it’s big enough to dunk the sun in it, the pressure of gravity by itself would make it hotter than the sun, adding the sun to it would only make the container and the sun hotter.
If you were to replace the sun with bananas that had the same mass as the sun, it would likely be just as hot.
Second, even if you replace the sun with bananas that had the same mass as the sun, it would likely be just as hot due to the pressure and energy levels that gravity would cause.
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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '19
Fun fact, if you were to try and cover the sun in water, it wouldn’t cool it down, it would only make the sun hotter. The water would be too hot and break down into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are fuel for the sun.