How close could I fly to the sun? What would be the first thing to kill me? Heat, Radiation, gravity? What could I do to mitigate the danger… SPF 5000? Once I got that close what would it take to get me out of the suns gravity? What if I substituted a red giant, pulsar, or blackhole?
Your best bet would be to go at night.
The first thing that will kill you is when you land on your head after thinking you can fly.
Lack of air to breathe would probably become an issue pretty quickly.
You can fly until the Sun melts the wax that holds the feathers on your wings.
Are you travelling in a Buzz Lightyear’s space suit or the USS Enterprise? You’d be killed by either heat or radiation, depending on how much shielding you have against the two, how quickly you are approaching, and the prevailing solar conditions. I’d guess that in some scenarios the radiation from a coronal mass ejection might kill you before you got close enough to cook.
A black hole won’t do anything to you until you get close enough for tidal forces to become significant (assuming there is no accretion disc around it), at which point you’d be spagettified.
Try to steer clear of Magnetars, the magnetic field would be strong enough to wipe your brain at a considerable distance. I’m guessing the workings of your nervous system would be affected before your tissues were torn apart due to the dimagnetism of water.
Lets say I’m flying in a space shuttle or a modern rocket. (yes I know the space shuttle isn’t capable of leaving earth orbit but it could be launched from a space station of some kind.)
After the spaceship, the second big problem would simply be getting there. It would take a HUGE amount of energy to get there. You can’t just point at it and hit go, you need to shed all of the earths orbital velocity to begin with.
the way it was explained to me went something like ,
you are a little bird in a bucket being spun around by a dude, try flying out the bucket straight in to the dude
This is a hard question to answer, because our spacecraft never “go directly to” anywhere. We use a number of sling shot maneuvers to tug a reasonably fast moving spacecraft to Mars, or Jupiter for example. So how we get there is a bit of a problem for me to work out. But other people around here may help. The often mentioned trick, “just shoot it into the sun” doesn’t work. Period. I know the sun is big and massive and has a ginormous gravitational pull. But it simply doesn’t work that way.
We can start to understand how close we can get to the sun by investigating spacecraft that have gotten close to the sun, and still function. This isn’t as easy to figure out, because when I go to Wikipedia to look for solar observatories … none of them have been particularly close. The sun is so big, staying in the Earth’s orbit, or the Earth-sun Lagrange point, is close enough to observe the sun. MESSENGER is orbiting the planet Mercury, which is kinda close, and its still functional so long as it’s fuel holds out.
But I don’t know if someone in a manned vehicle can survive even there.
Not always. I remember someone (maybe Chronos?) explaining how a particularly massive black hole wouldn’t spaghettify you, and if you considered gravitational forces alone, might be perfectly safe to cross the event horizon.
My guess is going to be heat. Radiation will kill you but I think it usually takes a few days even in extreme cases. Gravity generally only kills you when it makes you hit something - traveling towards the sun is essentially like taking a really long fall but not hitting the ground.
But it would be easier to see if you went at night during a full moon.
Good point.
But it would have to be really massive - a black hole with the mass of the Sun would spaghettify you. I’m pretty sure you need to get to thousands (or 100s of thousands) of solar masses before the tidal forces are small enough to survive.
Lemme know how that works out for you.
On the other hand, if he were suffering from severe depression triggered by his imminent immolation, it might help.
Just don’t forget the Replacement bulb.
There’s a decent argument that it might already be working out for me. And you, too!
It is in fact possible to pass through the event horizon of a black hole while in perfectly flat space, with no indication whatsoever of the crossing. We might, for all we can tell, have crossed an event horizon 73 seconds ago.
It would require what amounts to a cosmic conspiracy against us, though.