Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage à travers l’impossible features a trip to the sun.
In an episode of The Simpsons, Bart reads from a Radioactive Man comic book to show Lisa an example of Radioactive Man’s typical wit: Radioactive Man throws a villain into the sun, commenting “Hot enough for ya?”
A solar sail won’t spiral outward, without some sort of tacking. At the very least, you’d need to angle it so the light is reflected rearward in the orbit. And if you have enough control to do that, you could just as easily angle the sail the other way, and spiral in.
Regardless of the technology used, though, it would in general be easier to send any given object into Alpha Centauri, or most any other star, than into the Sun. It’d take a long time to get there, of course, but the energy requirements are actually lower.
See my post #29.
Wouldn’t something starting from Earth spiral out, as it begin in orbit around the Sun and accelerated straight away?
I mean, if it started with no angular momentum with respect to the Sun, then dropping it into the Sun is pretty trivial, no sails required.
Only if you had a sail so thin that the light pressure was stronger than the gravitational force, but that would require some insane materials, which we certainly don’t have now, and which might never actually be practical. Light pressure, like gravity, falls off as the inverse square of distance, so a body with a constant light sail actually still follows Kepler’s laws (just effectively with a weaker value of G). Release such a body from Earth orbit, and it’ll go out some ways, but then it’ll just come back in, on an elliptical orbit. The secret to a solar sail, and the reason they are actually doable with current technology, is that the sail doesn’t have to be constant. If, for instance, you start off in an elliptical orbit, and open the sail whenever you’re moving away from the Sun, but close it whenever you’re approaching, your orbit will gradually get more and more elongated, and further and further from the Sun. Do the reverse, closing the sail when receding and opening it when approaching, will slowly shrink your orbit.
I’m curious to know what assumptions you’re using here; are you assuming gravity assists from planets other than Earth?
It certainly takes less energy to give an object a parabolic escape trajectory than to stop it so that it drops into the sun (degenerate Hohmann transfer), but I think that as long as you don’t have any time constraints you can do a bielliptic transfer from the Earth to ~10AU and back to zero for less than the escape delta-v.