Is it possible to put water on the sun to extinguish it?
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As a child's pure question, after becoming a wise adult, I once again wondered, 'How much water should I sprinkle to extinguish the sun ...?' There should be. From a scientific point of view, this question, which is found to be not very meaningful, has led to the possibility that water may actually extinguish the sun if you take it a little seriously.
How Much Water Would Extinguish the Sun? --Universe Today
https://www.universetoday.com/117880/how-much-water-would-extinguish-the-sun/
The sun is 109 times the diameter of the earth and is a huge celestial body that occupies more than 99% of the mass of the entire solar system. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to realize the size of the sun, no matter what kind of sensation humans can feel on their skin. The structure of the sun is roughly divided into the nucleus, radiative zone, and convection zone from the center, but the outermost convection zone alone is 200,000 km thick, that is, the thickness of 16 earths.
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Just hearing that makes me wonder, 'It's impossible to extinguish the sun with water ...', but that's not the only difficulty in extinguishing the sun. The sun is not 'burning' in the first place, so it is extremely skeptical whether adding water can stop its activity.
Combustibles such as organic matter react violently with oxygen, which causes light and heat to be emitted at that time. In order to stop this reaction, the methods of 'cutting off the supply of oxygen' and 'lowering the temperature' are effective, and water has long been used as an effective tool for that purpose.
On the other hand, the energy source that the sun produces heat and light is the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms that are continuously generated in the core of the sun. The core of the sun is in a high-pressure, high-temperature environment of 250 billion atmospheres and 15 million kelvins, and when two hydrogen atoms collide with each other and change into helium atoms, it produces intense light and heat energy. Therefore, it makes no sense to stop the activity of the sun as if the fire brigade were spraying water.
What would be the result if water were decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen? Suppose that water with the same mass as the sun is supplied, and water molecules are decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen for some reason. As mentioned earlier, the fuel for the sun is the hydrogen atom. Therefore, if hydrogen is added by the supply of water, the sun will get more fuel and the activity will be more active, and it will not be possible to 'extinguish the sun'. This is completely counterproductive.
On the other hand, oxygen is also supplied to the sun, which has the opposite effect. However, the reason is not 'because oxygen and hydrogen burn'. In the sun, hydrogen atoms undergo nuclear fusion in a proton-proton chain reaction , and at the same time, a reaction called the CNO cycle occurs. This is a chain reaction involving carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and oxygen (O), and 1.6% of the energy generated by the sun is generated by this reaction.
In other words, the activity of the sun is also activated by supplying oxygen. Furthermore, this CNO cycle is characterized by an increase in the proportion of the entire reaction as the mass of the star increases. Therefore, it can be predicted that when the mass of the sun increases due to the supply of oxygen, the CNO cycle will be activated and the activity of the sun will increase dramatically.
From such a theory, it is predicted that not only will the sun not be extinguished by water, but rather it will intensify its activity. However, there is only one way that water may weaken the work of the sun. It is 'a large amount of water hits the sun at super high speed'. Although the sun is a huge celestial body, it does not have a crust like the earth, and is basically a collection of gases mainly composed of hydrogen. If you can hit a very large amount of water here at the same speed as light, you may be able to split the round sun in half like a watermelon. Then, the sun whose mass has been halved will also have its attractive force halved, and it will not be possible to create the high-temperature, high-pressure environment that was the source of energy generation. When this happens, the fusion reaction will stop, and the sun will stop working brilliantly.
In other words, it is theoretically not impossible to stop the activity of the sun with the extremely high performance of a
By Angus Chan
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