The Sun is hot. What if we tried to extinguish it? Maybe you're having a bad day. Or maybe you're an intergalactic supervillain with a passion for cosmic-scale hydraulic experiments. Whatever the reason, today you're asking: "Hey, how much water would it take to extinguish the Sun?"
Short answer: All of it. And it's still not enough.
Long answer? Buckle up your space diving helmet. Here we go.
First mistake: Believing the Sun is "fire"
No, the Sun is not a cosmic bonfire lit with a galactic lighter. What we call fire needs oxygen, carbon, and maybe a spark.
The Sun? It laughs in the face of oxygen. It heats up by crushing atoms together until they fuse. It's a nuclear bodybuilder.
Ultimately, the Sun is a nuclear fusion reactor suspended in space that every second fuses 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium.
So throwing water on it is like tossing a snowball into a thermonuclear furnace. Only with more explosions.
The hydraulic plan: Let's throw a water planet at it
Let's pretend we have access to a giant planet made of 100% water. Like a super-Earth made only of ocean, no islands, no mosquitoes, no sense.
We launch it straight at the Sun.
What happens?
- The water dissociates even before reaching the solar surface. H₂O ➝ H + O, boom. The oxygen? It's gone. The hydrogen? The Sun loves it: it's fuel!
- Instead of extinguishing it, we could fuel it. It's like throwing gasoline cans on an already crazy F1 engine.
- If the impact is large (e.g., tens of Jovian masses), we disturb its stability. But beware: we don't extinguish it. We make it collapse, explode, mutate. Stuff that ends up in Netflix documentaries with titles like "When the Sun Lost Its Temper."
How big would this aquarium planet need to be?
To have a chance of seriously disturbing the Sun, our liquid planet would have to weigh at least as much as it does.
That is:
1 Earth = 5.97 × 10²⁴ kg
1 Sun = 2 × 10³⁰ kg
So we would need about 333,000 Earths of water.
At that point, you don't have a planet, you have a pregnant aquatic star. Which implodes before it can hit anything.
In practice: you're not extinguishing the Sun. You're introducing it to a colleague.
What if you actually managed to extinguish it?
Congratulations! You've just condemned all of humanity to certain death. No sun, no photosynthesis, goodbye climate, farewell life. All you're left with is a frozen planet, full of former influencers and UV ray nostalgics.
Forget about the star. Turn off the stove.
The Sun won't extinguish. It will burn itself out, but in 5 billion years. In the meantime, we can continue to complain about the heat, curse mosquitoes, and fantasize about ridiculous but beautiful solutions.
And if you really want to show off at the next aperitivo, casually drop this line:
"Did you know that to extinguish the Sun, you'd need an ocean with the mass of 333,000 Earths?"
Then sip your spritz as if you've solved clean energy.
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