How much water would it take to extinguish the sun?

Have you ever thought of trying to switch off the shining star by pouring water onto it?!Well before you make further plans,read this..

• Because the sun isn’t powered by oxidation, but by nuclear reactions, putting water on the sun isn’t going to slow it down much at all, in fact, adding *LOTS* of water would probably make the sun brighter.That said, water extinguishes fire by two methods: cutting off oxygen, and cooling things down. You could try to approximate how much water at 0 degrees C it would take to cool the sun down to 100 degrees C.Alternatively, you could look up (use e.g. google) the amount of energy that the sun produces, and figure out how much water boiling off per second would be required to consume that amount of heat.
•  Since the Sun radiates away its heat, and radiation is the least efficient of the heat transfer methods, placing the Sun in a tub of water would draw heat away from the Sun much quicker. But like said earlier, the Sun is not like fire here on Earth. The Sun shines by fusing hydrgen into helium by the immense pressure at its core. Adding anything to the Sun is sure to increase that pressure and make it burn even brighter. And (just a guess…) since water is 2 hydrogen atoms, they’ll probably get stripped away from the oxygen by the high heat so you’d only be adding more fuel to the fire + an oxidizer.
• You will never be able to extinguish the sun with water. Adding water not only increases the amount of hydrogen fuel available to the star, but also increases the mass, hence increasing the pressure in the core of the star and thereby also increasing the rate at which nuclear fusion occurs.
• I think a simple (and very imaginary) problem like this would be asking for a quantity of water (at some temperature – e.g. 0°C) that would be required to bring the temperature below the threshold for fusion – in this case for the CNO-cycle.Obviously, it will be a large mass – on the order of the mass of the sun – and anything that large with H and O might itself have sufficient mass to induce fusion or the conditions for fusion.
• It is not possible. That mass of water would collapse like the gas cloud that formed the sun, the intense pressure would cause temperatures to rise in the core, causing the water molecules to break down into component atoms which would become ionized. Voila we have a new star. It cannot be done. The problem is a worthless excersize in algebra that has no connection to reality
• In theory you could apply enough water to extinguish the sun, the issue with this is that the mass of that water would be so great that it would start to break down and cause fusion of the atoms, thus creating a second star.
• Barring this physics barrier and the fact that water contains hydrogen that would just be adding fuel to the sun it is not impossible to extinguish the sun using water it is just HIGHLY improbable. (People will only tell you it is impossible because we have not determined the way to do it yet).

  On the other hand I found this article that discusses the size of an explosion needed to destroy the solar system: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/nov…

  Of course extinguishing or destroying the sun would be a rather bad move for most of us so it is probably best to avoid starting your water collection now!

 

Wasn’t that intersting?!

2008

06/28

CATEGORY

Science

TAGS

extinguish
sun
water

Write comment