Nuking the Sun, is it possible?

it is so easy to dupe most people when it comes to describing how the natural world works.

You mean to say that what the OP described can't actually happen?

If we can hit Mars, I bet you $10,000 we can hit the sun.

Wow...

First, yes you can shoot a nuclear missle at the sun. It wouldn't even really be hard. It would never make it. You would never see it. If you were to try to look for the explosion you would go blind from staring at the sun. Besides all the other garbage that was posted, the biggest thing is that you couldn't even see it. Its too far away and the sun is too bright.

Second, there's alot of nonsense posted about how to get it to the sun. Someone spewed some nonsense about finding an "orbit" that "intersects" the sun, and was then backed up by someone of equal (lack of) knowledge. If it intersects with the sun, its not an orbit by deffinition. All you have to do is get the thing far enough from earth so that its not greatly affected by its gravity. Next, point it at the sun and hit the gas. As long as it doesn't come across any other objects, nothing is going to stop it from hitting the sun. Someone correctly cited Newton's laws of motion earlier. Thats true, get it moving, and it won't stop. Things don't just randomly start orbiting stars.

Third, to the person concerned about destroying the moon with a missle is really overestimating the power of a nuclear weapon. The largest bomb ever made was detonated on earth and barely had an impact on the planet. You see those craters on the moon? If that much energy didn't affect it, we're not going to any time soon.

Educated_Observer wrote:

What about..... wrote:

.....THE MOON? Nuking the sun would suck, you couldn't even look at it to observe the relatively minuscule explosion.

Nuking the moon would be a bad, bad idea. We depend on the moon to provide gravity for our oceans. The tides depend on this. Without the moon there would be no tides > No trade winds > no climate.

Lets stick with the sun, it is so big that I doubt a nuke would knock it out, it will just look cool in the process.

'nuking' the moon is not the same as 'destroying' the moon, you stupid f***. a nuclear weapon wouldn't do anything to the moon.

Bonzai! wrote:

'nuking' the moon is not the same as 'destroying' the moon, you stupid f***. a nuclear weapon wouldn't do anything to the moon.

It would at least knock it off track a bit, enough to mess up the tides. A 200 Megaton bomb would, which is totally possible by today's standards of bomb building.

First the sun isn't at all like a nuclear bomb it is the opposite. The sun uses nuclear fusion the nuclear bomb uses fission. Second thing we don't need to blow it up just wait 5 billion years and it will blow up on its own (the blast radius will go past the earth).

These two idiots have the same IP adress. How pathetic.

Educated_Observer wrote:

Bonzai! wrote:

'nuking' the moon is not the same as 'destroying' the moon, you stupid f***. a nuclear weapon wouldn't do anything to the moon.

It would at least knock it off track a bit, enough to mess up the tides. A 200 Megaton bomb would, which is totally possible by today's standards of bomb building.

No, it wouldn't. Like I said above, the Moon has survived impacts on that scale before. 200 megatons is huge in its effect on people and landscape. Not so huge on the cosmic scale.

No Way wrote:

No, it wouldn't. Like I said above, the Moon has survived impacts on that scale before. 200 megatons is huge in its effect on people and landscape. Not so huge on the cosmic scale.

Just who do you think you are, one of the Mythbusters? You can't possibly know this for sure.

If man wanted to destroy the moon, he could, admit it.

Educated_Observer wrote:

Just who do you think you are, one of the Mythbusters? You can't possibly know this for sure.

If man wanted to destroy the moon, he could, admit it.

Haha, I do love Mythbusters, but I'm actually a real scientist. I'm a biologist, not a physicist, but physics can indeed allow me to know for sure that a 200 megaton bomb will not destroy the moon or even knock it out of orbit.

No Way wrote:

...but physics can indeed allow me to know for sure that a 200 megaton bomb will not destroy the moon or even knock it out of orbit.

Q: What's the last thing a fly sees before it gets squashed on a windshield?

A: It's arse!

A 200 megaton bomb to the moon is like the above analog. Zip. Squat. Diddly. Nada.

DUMB

fly and windshield wrote:

No Way wrote:

...but physics can indeed allow me to know for sure that a 200 megaton bomb will not destroy the moon or even knock it out of orbit.

Q: What's the last thing a fly sees before it gets squashed on a windshield?

A: It's arse!

A 200 megaton bomb to the moon is like the above analog. Zip. Squat. Diddly. Nada.

Exactly. Like I said, I'm not a physicist, but doing some quick (maybe wrong) calculations led me to believe that it would take 7.347x10^18 joules to accelerate the moon 0.01 meters per second. The moon is accelerating away from the earth at nearly 4 times this ammount anyways.

In order to create this much energy, all of the energy from a 2 GIGAton bomb would have to be directed at the moon.

No Way wrote:

If it intersects with the sun, its not an orbit by deffinition.

Mathematically, any trajectory of an object within the sun's gravitational influence is an orbit. Typically, you treat the bodies as point masses, and gives you perfectly accurate results even if (or up until) the projected orbit intersects the actual surface of the body.

All you have to do is get the thing far enough from earth so that its not greatly affected by its gravity. Next, point it at the sun and hit the gas. As long as it doesn't come across any other objects, nothing is going to stop it from hitting the sun. Someone correctly cited Newton's laws of motion earlier. Thats true, get it moving, and it won't stop. Things don't just randomly start orbiting stars.

I hope you don't work for NASA. You're only displaying a cursory knowledge of Newton's laws. Things DO randomly start orbiting stars when they're moving at high speed near the star, and it's Newton's laws that predict this. Think of a comet. For most of its trajectory, it's pretty much falling straight toward the sun, but most of them never hit it. Why? Because they aren't just falling toward it, they're in an orbit.

If you get your missile to just escape the earth's gravity, it will still have almost the exact same orbit as the earth, at about 30 km/s. Even if, at this point, you were to aim the missile directly at the sun, and impart another 30km/s of velocity in that direction, it would not hit the sun. It's closest approach would be about 75 million km (still well outside Mercury's orbit) and on it's way around the other side, it would eventually leave the solar system entirely and never come back. It's NEVER as simple as point and hit the gas.

Here, study up:

As I said, I don't work for NASA, I'm a biologist and have only taken Phys I and II as well as RBD. I understand what you mean with the missle keeping earth's relative velocity with respect to the sun. However, I think my idea of what I was talking about and your idea are different. In my head when I was imagining this, the missle would be free from earth's gravity, then point itself at the sun and then receive a force towards the sun. Because the force originated from the rocket itself (or immediately behind it) and not from the earth, the earth wouldn't have any affect on it. I could still be wrong, thats just my understanding.Also, as far as objects randomly orbiting things, an object heading directly towards the sun isn't going to stop and start orbitting it. It would have to have a path other than directly at the sun.

The key to harnessing the power of the sun is merely speaking its name.

The most pertinent facts about this are a. that we couldn't look directly into a sun explosion (which someone said, but also that for the purposes of the 4th of July, you'd have to have a daytime fireworks show to even be able logically to look at the sun), and b. that the sun is so far away we'd have to plan so many years in advance (I'm guessing, though no math rests behind this statement) to not only get the bomb to the sun, but to then time our seeing of the explosion on earth as opposed to when it blows up at the sun. Which brings me to my next question:

Can someone explain the theory of relativity? I was trying to think about this the other day in the same way as hearing a train whistle as it passes by, and hearing the pitch modulate because the speed of the train is fast enough to be relevant to the sound waves to distort them. So, I was thinking about it like the difference between an event happening and someone elses observation of it while they are moving relative to the event. But what I couldn't wrap my head around was how events that are not judged visually make sense, like if an astronaut went on a long space expidition how he could return back to earth younger than his former contemporaries because time would have been experienced differently for him than for them. What makes time pass more slowly for the astronaut? Is the theory of relativity not about the perception of time or events?

What would be smart is launching all the spent nuke fuel and waste as rocket payloads to be incinerated by the sun. Then we wouldn't have to bury it in Nevada.

Ex Lax wrote:

What would be smart is launching all the spent nuke fuel and waste as rocket payloads to be incinerated by the sun. Then we wouldn't have to bury it in Nevada.

And who would foot the bill for that solution? I'm as much an idealist as anyone but that would be expensive as all get out.