If you had a knife big and sharp enough, could you cut the sun in half?

Just Curious 2 No wrote:

And if not cut it in half, maybe cut smaller pieces from it? I was thinking it might be a solution to climate change? And maybe there is a way of blowing the bits you cut off to other parts of the solar system to heat up planets like Mars, or even the moon, so we can habitat them?

Not really

There’s often stupid stuff posted on this site, this is up there with the most stupid

A knife may not be feasible, I would suggest a sword pre 1250 AD

Knife would melt, no matter how big, no matter how sharp

Next question?

Yes, it's kind of feasible, theoretically speaking, not of course with a 'knife', but if you had a big enough blow torch. Obviously, it would have to be VERY BIG, in fact off the top of my head I'd calculate at over 1 light year in length (gives a new meaning to a 'light saber', LOL!).

Of course, we don't yet have the kind of meta-materials that could build such a crazy device, but I'm guessing a phase 3 Kardishian civilization would find it child's play.

In fact, there's speculation from some scientists that so called 'solar flares' are in fact an alien species doing this very thing, and probably blowing the fragments of the sun they have cut off to the outer solar system in order to heat up their worlds beyond the Oort clouds.

Only if the knife was solar powered or some shit.

Just Curious 2 No wrote:

And if not cut it in half, maybe cut smaller pieces from it? I was thinking it might be a solution to climate change? And maybe there is a way of blowing the bits you cut off to other parts of the solar system to heat up planets like Mars, or even the moon, so we can habitat them?

I assume this is just trolling, but I still want to answer it since I'm pretty awesome.

Large astronomical objects like stars and planets are not held together by chemistry (positive and negative charges), as is the case for objects like apples, but by gravity (i.e., mass).

A star is a hot gas forced into a roughly spherical shape by gravity with a radius that is a function of its mass and temperature, i.e., its gravity tries to compress it and its thermodynamic properties tries to expand it.

So, what's this mean? It means if you were to partition a star into multiple parts and separate them by some relatively small distance, each part would expand (due to gravity and outward thermodynamic pressure no longer being in equilibrium) and each part would also be attracted to every other part, thus gravity would force it back into a sphere. It would quickly evolve towards its previous equilibrium state, e.g., it would have the same radius as it had previous to the partitioning.

Not with a material knife, but if you could create a giant magnetic field bigger than the sun, you could maybe orient it so the north sun would go one way and the south sun would go another way.

If everyone pointed their lasers at it a hole would form. Unfortunately only about half the planet can see the sun at the same time, so this could never happen.

Only a Ginsu knife could do this.

I Know it all wrote:

Knife would melt, no matter how big, no matter how sharp

Next question?

Anyone with half a brain would first try cutting the moon in half before attempting to slice open the sun. Duh.....

Its possible but if you cut off too much of the sun, you'd run the risk of triggering another ice age.

Just Curious 2 No wrote:

And if not cut it in half, maybe cut smaller pieces from it? I was thinking it might be a solution to climate change? And maybe there is a way of blowing the bits you cut off to other parts of the solar system to heat up planets like Mars, or even the moon, so we can habitat them?

Hey man wow you are blowing my mind! Maybe we could bring a piece to earth to provide all our energy needs!

I would be better to harvest one of Jupiters larger moons by using super retro rockets and put it in earths orbit. this would block the sun and lower earth temperatures .

Instead of doing this which would be costly, we can just have everyone on the daytime side of the earth jump really hard over and over and it will propel the earth away from the sun

For the knife idea, I believe cutco makes some quality stuff I bet with a big enough commission they would work with NASA to provide the means to accomplish this

The sun is about 27,000,000 degrees F. Tungsten, which is the metal with the highest melting point, melts about 6,000 degrees F. So, the knife would have to be big, but not sharp because the sun is gas, and made of a metal that I don't know of.

There are ceramic knives and the highest melting point are ceramics are about 7,000F. In either case, the blade would melt before it even touched the sun.

You'd have to visit at night to avoid burning up.

fdfssdfsdfdsf wrote:

The sun is about 27,000,000 degrees F. Tungsten, which is the metal with the highest melting point, melts about 6,000 degrees F. So, the knife would have to be big, but not sharp because the sun is gas, and made of a metal that I don't know of.

There are ceramic knives and the highest melting point are ceramics are about 7,000F. In either case, the blade would melt before it even touched the sun.

The sun doesn't have a uniform temperature throughout its many layers. In fact, very bizarrely one of its inner layers is much, much cooler than the outer layer. Astronomers still don't understand the reason why. Our professor at Stanford once speculated to us (after class) that it could be aliens who had deliberately cooled that layer in order to use it as a habitat. Why can't we see them? According to our professor, they could have long ago mastered nano-technology and shrunk themselves and their habitats down to even the sub-atomic level. There could literally be trillions of little green men living on the sun, and we would never even know.

It's already been done.