What would happen to a living creature who falls into the sun?
- Thread starter pluto2
- Start date
1) Freeze-drying starting as soon as you "got out the door"
2) Cooking as you approached the sun
3) Dissociation into component parts as you reached the corona
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
The sun is almost a million miles in diameter. Even at the speed of light it would take you almost five seconds to make the transit.
You would be, to put it mildly, toast.
Isn't the pressure also pretty high in the center? Wouldn't you be crushed?
nitpicking!
Just take a really long run up.
Just take a really long run up.
The sun is almost a million miles in diameter. Even at the speed of light it would take you almost five seconds to make the transit.
You would be, to put it mildly, toast.
Isn't the pressure also pretty high in the center? Wouldn't you be crushed?
The point isn't that at the speed of light you would be vaparized. it's that if you go fast enough you could pass through the sun unharmed. for example if you swipe your hand through a candle really fast you dont get burned. Plus at the speed of light we dont know what will happen to a human. the likelyhood is that you would die, but if you didn't theres no way for us to predict how we will interact with things traveling at that speed. You could pass through the sun at the speed of light becuase for all we know your not exposed to the heat long enough to burn in each section. it would be interesting for them to do an experiment with a car in a flaming tunnel. they could keep the car still for however long and let it burn/melt. Then they could do the same thing for the same amount of time with the car moving at speed and see how the cars effected differently. (i wouldn't be suprised if it's nowhere near as effected by the heat).
the pressure would be great but the same principle applies. if you travel fast enough you might circumnavigate the effect of the pressure. the only way to test this would be underwater.
the biggest worry traveling through the sun is (apart from the incredible heat an preasure presuming you somehow survive this) hitting something. becuase NASA has detected high amounts of what they think is molten iron due to the fact the surface of the sun changes so much. If this is true then the odds are the center of the sun could be solid, and if it is you wouldn't want to hit it at the speed of light.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Obviously you can't travel at the speed of light. But even if you could travel at 90% of the speed of light it would still take more than five seconds to pass through the sun.
The surface temperature of the sun is 5000 degrees Kelvin! Perhaps a robot made of some as-yet uninvented metal alloy or ceramic could survive five seconds at that temperature. But a big blob of organic matter? You must be joking! Perhaps a few bits of bone would come out the other side, but no soft tissue.
Oh yeah: the temperature at the center of the sun is ten million degrees. Who thinks anything we could throw in there would not be turned to gas within two seconds, much less five?
As I mentioned in my first post, you will spend five whole seconds exposed to that heat. Even if it was only 5000 degrees it would kill you and destroy most of your body. But it turns out that at the middle the temperature is ten million degrees. You can forget about it!
You don't seem to grasp the difference between a "really hot fire" and 10,000,000 degrees.
It would take five seconds if an outside observer was watching. From your point of view, it would take an immeasurably short time to transit the sun at the speed of light. (Of course you run into other problems at or near that speed.)
The center of the sun is made of hydrogen and helium. It is also ten times the density of lead due to the insanely high pressures.
So even if you could reach 0.9c, you would still smash into this "wall" and would quickly bake to death at 10 million degrees.
At .9C you would "smash into the wall" well beyond the corona. At those speeds even diffuse gas acts like a concrete wall.