Is it possible to blow up the sun? What would happen if a person could blow it up? Is it even a realistic threat we should be concerned about? I’m not crazy or anything, I’m just pondering this. Thanks
You would probably burn your lips if you tried.
Blow it up with what technology? It wouldn’t even be noticeable on the sun if you were to blow up an atomic bomb of any size currently available. Propose a technology that might allow blowing up the sun. Tell us why that technology is anywhere close to being invented. Otherwise, the answer is simply no. You can’t blow up the sun.
I think imploding the sun is more feasible, but not by us …
Not by any technology humankind is likely to possess in the next million years or so. The energy released in a supernova (which is what you get when you blow up a star), is on the order of 10[sup]44[/sup] joules. By contrast, if you converted the entire mass of the earth directly into energy (good ol’ E=mc[sup]2[/sup]), you’d only get 1.35*10[sup]40[/sup] joules, still several orders of magnitude less than what is required to cause a star to go supernova.
It’d be easier to build a giant sun-blocking machine.
Just be careful around Maggie.
If you think about it, the sun is blowing up right now. Every second, the nuclear reactions in the star’s core convert millions of tons of hydrogen into helium. The total energy output of these rections is on the order of 10^33 ergs per second. By contrast, a one megaton nuclear bomb produces, in total, about 10^22 ergs. So even if you detonated a hundred billion warheads in the sun’s center, that would just be roughly equal to what is already happening there every second.
Physically destroying the sun would then require substantially more energy. The force holding sun together is plain old gravity, and the energy stored such a mass is called the gravitational binding energy. The expression for this for a spherical mass works out to be (3/5)GM^2/R, where G is the gravitational constant, M is the total amount of mass, and R is the sphere’s radius. For the sun this is about 10^48 ergs. This gives a pretty good idea of the amount of energy it would take to physically disassemble the mass that makes up the sun.
Needless to say, nothing we can do would supply that much energy short of physically ramming the sun with the Earth (or another planet) moving close to the speed of light.
Maybe you could use “strangelets”?
If stranglets were any danger, we’d never even have been around to know it.
A white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole crashing into the sun would send a shockwave through that would make most of it’s mass fuse at once. It would basically supernova. Getting the stellar remnant into position would be the hard part.
The newer model 1920s Style Death Ray may be able to do it… but please, don’t try it at home.
Where’s the “1920s style death ray” thing from? It’s showing up everywhere now and I can’t remember where I first heard it. Futurama?
Since astronomy books love to point out that stars are kept “alive” by a delicate balancing act between the expansive forces generated by the fusion in the interior, and the … uh … (no sleep … can’t think … language center of brain frozen) … collapsive? force of the gravity produced by the big ol’ mass of the star, it’s clear that blowing up the sun couldn’t be simpler. You just need to turn off the sun’s gravity.
Conveniently, I think one of the later models of 1920s-style death rays will do that.
According to The Simpsons’ Mr Burns:
"Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun…"
Even he only managed to block it out, though.
Too bad I left my Tox-Uthat in my other pants.
Long, long ago I remember a plan for a graser (gamma-ray laser) that could reputedly “poke a hole through the sun”. I haven’t heard anything factual about it, however, and searching on it seems to bring up scads of sites designed by teens that believe they live in Star Wars Galaxies…
The simple answer here is if anyone had the technology to blow up the sun, surely technology of this sophistication could just as easily be used to destroy the Earth. In fact, I’d presume that technology sufficent to destroy all life on Earth would be far less sophisticated then what would be needed to blow up the sun. Hypothetical mad scientists wanting to blow up the Earth wouldn’t be thinking of achieving this by blowing up the sun.
Well, if I happen to have some trilithium resin lying around…
Ross:
Pfff, Futurama? Everyone knows they use 2700s style death rays.
Protomatter, people, protomatter!
Well some people have played with the idea of Star lifting
Mind you it lacks the enthusiasm of an explosion but at least it’s potentially doable.