• Question: How large would a bucket of water have to be to put out the sun?

    Asked by Mason The Amazing :) to Andrew, Hina, Ian, Kathryn, Leah-Nani, Xu on 14 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Leah-Nani Alconcel

      Leah-Nani Alconcel answered on 14 Jun 2018:

      No amount of water could put out the sun, because it isn’t burning the way a campfire does. It’s hot because at its core, nuclear fusion is happening, not combustion. So pouring water on the sun would pretty much just heat up and decompose the water into plasma. You’d be helping the sun to get bigger and hotter, not put it out!

    • Photo: Kathryn Burrows

      Kathryn Burrows answered on 14 Jun 2018:

      I agree with Leah-Nani, but if the bucket was really large and made of something dense like gold or iron we may be able to trigger a supernova ?!?

    • Photo: Andrew Margetts-Kelly

      Andrew Margetts-Kelly answered on 19 Jun 2018:

      Yeah, what they said.
      —
      Because water has lots of hydrogen in this will just keep fuelling the fusion. It don’t matter that the water is cold and might lower the temperature enough to stop fusion, because the extra mass would increase the sun’s gravity and that would increase the pressure which would increase the temperature.
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      It’d be a little bit like trying to put a petrol fire by pouring petrol on it.
      —
      Seriously though there are three ways you could put the sun out, all mean putting in a lot of water and you might need to wait for a while…
      1. Add more than 40 to 100 times the mass of the sun in water and it will eventually collapse into a black hole.
      2. Add 100 to 250 times the mass of the sun in water and it will eventually collapse then explode leaving nothing behind.
      3. Add more than 250 times the mass of the sun in water and it will eventually collapse into a black hole.

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