Battle for the Sun

I find the amount of pseudoscience in this threat disturbing...

For those who missed my other post:

MY PINK BOTS WILL BLOT OUT THE SUN!!

Aeon: Our czars will blot out the sun!
UEF: THEN WE WILL TURTLE IN THE SHADE!

Aaaand the discussion is dead.

Good talking Science with you boys while it lasted!

I've always said we should blow up Uranus or Neptune with all the nukes on the planet. Would be cool to be able to blow up a gas giant with nukes, or cause it to 'erupt' and destroy bases in orbit on moons.

That basement dwelling math power. Props I suppose.

We can not get nukes far enough into gas giants to even make an impact... Nukes are not like normal explosives, they have a system that requires extreme accuracy and timing to make them even go off properly. The pressure and temperature in a gas giant would most likely disturb that system.

this was an amazing duscussion to follow ^^

Multi-stage high-yield warheads have complex systems, but the basic fission warhead just needs you to smack 2 >0.5 critical mass halves together. You could build a warhead that would do that automatically under the pressure from entering a gas giant atmosphere.

However, in my opinion we don't have enough fissile material on the planet (even if we harvest and enrich all of it) to make enough of a dent on Jupiter. I'm not sure people realise how big it actually is: Jupiter is <expletive> massive. It has an approximately 10 times larger radius than Earth, meaning it has approximately 1000 times more volume. I stole this shamelessly from Wikipedia because I think it looks pretty (Sun > Jupiter > Earth > Moon):


Yes, the famous red spot is actually bigger than the Earth. If you want to blow that up, you're going to need a bigger gun. :shock:

That iron collapse theory is complete bollocks. How many asteroids have a ton of iron in them, and how many of them have crashed into stars? If a tiny chunk of metal could cause stars to fail, we wouldn't be in a galaxy with trillions of functioning stars. There would be like... a dozen ultra rare stupidly lucky stars that have been able to dodge any and all sources of iron for all eternity.

The shape of our own solar system suggests that heavy materials tend to drift closer to the system's center. The idea that our sun doesn't already have a ton of heavy materials in its core is complete insanity.

I thought these gas giants were composed of flammable gases like hydrogen? I was thinking more along the lines of the nuclear explosion basically starting a chain reaction, not actually destroying the planet with the nuclear explosion itself.

Such is the pressure (200 GPa and upwards) that the Hydrogen in the atmosphere of Jupiter has changed into its liquid metallic form. The Hydrogen field of Jupiter is estimated at about 70 percent of the of the atmosphere, forming a pseudo-mantle under Jupiter's "clouds", and it's at about 10,000K most of the time at its outermost edge. The Core (A dense rocky mass) is estimated at a whopping 36,000K and accounts for a mere 10% of the total radius of the planet. If the Hydrogen were going to explode... it already would have.

The "clouds" of Jupiter are mostly composed of ammonia crystals, phosphorus, sulfur and possibly hydrocarbons and ammonium hydrosulfide. The Outer atmosphere is not very explosive at all... or Meteorites would have set Jupiter on fire billions of years ago.

The explosive properties of hydrogen, methane and other materials work fine in an atmosphere that contains enough free oxygen (O2) to allow them to oxidise (Earth atmosphere is 20% O2). Jupiter has a fair bit of water apparently, however that is the oxidation product of hydrogen; i.e. hydrogen that has already burnt.

I couldn't find anything in that page that stated free oxygen even exists in the atmosphere of Jupiter, so I suspect that all of the burning has been done already, and oxygen only exists in compound form. So a nuke isn't going to chain react anything, just do shockwave damage to an atmosphere that already has the most violent (and massive) storms known to man.

I cannot conceive of a realistic weapon powerful enough to do any appreciable damage to any gas giant we have in the solar system. Even if we put PA engines on the Earth and rammed it into Jupiter at several hundred kilometers per second, I can't see it doing more than adding another Great Red Spot, and maybe perturbing the orbit a little. :|

That's awesome! Thanks.

You raise an excellent point. However if you somehow managed to get enough iron I suppose you could just nudge it towards the star and then let gravity run its course. The iron, now in a plasma state due to the tempature, would naturally settle down to the core and absorb the energy that would otherwise keep the fusion process going resulting in a gravitational collapse of the star and subsequent supernova.

However the super heated iron would need to overcome the outward push of the solar wind so some initial velocity might be required to augment gravity's pull. Either that or the iron chunk (cloud when its nice and close/hot) would need to be large enough such that its own gravity would be able to keep the outer layers of it from blowing away in the solar wind.

So you would either need really really big chunks, which would be very hard to move, or you would need to fire smaller chunks from some kind of rail gun. However if you did find some way to get a stupid amount of iron divided into a very large number of very large chunks and then figured out how to fire them from some kind of rail gun you would probably be better off just using said rail gun to shoot the enemy's planets directly.

So while the possibility of destroying a star exists in the realm of science, the tech needed to do so would by necessity provide far better ways to blow things up than spending ages throwing incredible amounts of iron into a star. And the amount of iron needed would just be impractical.

As a site note, I think we may have discovered an excelent topic for an XKCD What If.

You misunderstand the amount of iron needed to make this happen. The entire asteroid belt wouldn't even begin to make a dent in our sun. However iron is the one and only thing that destroys stars (not counting black holes, but it is hard to call them "things" depending on how you look at them) as far we know given our current understanding of the universe/physics due to iron's rather unique nuclear properties in relation to nuclear fusion. Heavier things like gold and mercury aren't an issue due to the way that fusion physics works, its just iron that does bad things to stars, and the amount needed to kill a star is simply mind boggling. In fact the only thing capable of producing that much iron in one place that we know of is a star that has run out of lighter elements (like hydrogen) to fuse and so resorts to fusing heavier elements, like aluminum, which results in iron.

Um, guys?
What about a brown dwarf star? I know this was already mentioned, but you kinda ignored the poor fellow.

750k =/= 6000k, therefore bots have a chance of actually surviving being there.

Just think of them as warmer, slightly larger/smaller Jupiters.


I'm at least a little sure they can also have planets, but they tend to almost orbit the planets, in a geo-centric kind of way. Might be wrong though, the wiki page only vaguely mentions planets. Perhaps a multi-star system with a brown dwarf and a standard G2, or red giant?

what about 2 suns attracted by each other (tatooine easter egg ^^)

Like this? Not sure how accurate that quote is, but I know that binary stars are not rare by any means of the imagination. What I meant was one of the planets in the system being a brown dwarf 'star', similar to a 'hot jupiter'.

exactly what i was talking about; i know that it does exist in real so maybe it could be implemented in the game

Death Star like Metal planets are confirmed. The power needed for the Death Star to fire its laser is like turning the sun into anti-matter then taking another sun and burning the to together into pure light and shooting it all out as a laser beam in under a second. Also the beam travels faster then light! And the power needed to move the Death Star at its stated speed is enough to fire its main weapon non stop plus some.

Realism! What is that?

It like the Q in Star Trek so how would you do it? oh I would just change the rules of physics.