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What would happen if you were to bring a tiny piece of the Sun to Earth?
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Short answer: you die. Long answer: it depends which piece of the Sun.
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Like most of the matter in the universe, our Sun is neither solid, liquid or gas, but plasma.
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Plasma is when stuff is so hot that the nuclei and electrons can separate and flow around freely, which creates a goo like substance.
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So, you can imagine our Sun as an extremely big, spherical ocean of very hot goo.
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The deeper you, go the denser and weirder the goo becomes.
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So let's bring 3 samples (each the size of a house), to our lab here on Earth and see what happens.
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First sample: the chromosphere.
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The chromosphere is the atmosphere of the Sun, a layer of sparse gas up to 5,000 kilometers deep,
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that's covered in a forest of plasma spikes that can be almost as big as Earth.
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It's pretty hot here between 6,000 and 20,000 degrees Celsius, but if we brought a solvent of it to Earth,
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we're not really getting our money's worth.
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Where we take our sample, the chromosphere is over a million times less dense than air.
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So, compared to our atmosphere at sea level, it's basically the same as bringing the vacuum of space down to Earth.
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The moment our sample arrives, it would immediately be crushed by Earth's atmospheric pressure and implode.
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Air would rush to fill the vacuum and use as much energy as 12 kilograms of TNT in the process.
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This creates a high pressure shockwave, which shatters glass, ruptures ear drums,
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and maybe some internal organs. If you're standing too close it could kill you, so you'd better keep your distance
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Let's go deeper.
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Second sample, the photosphere
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Beneath the chromosphere, is the glowing surface of the Sun: the photosphere, which produces the light we see.
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It's covered in a grid of a million hot spots called granules. Each of them about as big as the United States,
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and over 5,000 degrees Celsius.
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These granules are the tops of convective columns, churning gas that brings the heat up from the center of the Sun to its surface.
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In these columns, a few hundred kilometres down, we take our second plasma sample. It has about the same pressure as our atmosphere on earth
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Though still much less dense for there. Its heat supports it, so it won't implode.
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Our sphere now carries twice as much energy, as much as 25 kilograms of TNT, that this time as heat.
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For a dazzling instant, this plasma would glow with a million times the brightness of the Sun seen from Earth,
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instantly lighting fires throughout our lab, but a few milliseconds later. Those fires are all that's left.
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The plasma has cooled to harmless gas, floating up from the flaming ruins.
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What if we go deeper?
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Third sample. The radiative zone.
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Here, the plasma is about two million degrees Celsius, and so dense and tightly packed, that it creates a sort of maze for itself.
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Energy in the form of photons tries to escape,
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but has to wander for hundreds of thousands of years, bouncing endlessly from particle to particle, until it eventually finds an exit.
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Bringing matter from here to our lab, is what experts call, a very bad idea.
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As soon as it arrives in our lab, the extreme pressure that holds the plasma tightly together is gone,
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and the material explodes with the power of a thermonuclear weapon. Our lab as well as the city around it will be destroyed in an instant.
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On the bright side, there won't be any radioactive fallout.
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With our lab destroyed, we can abandon the illusion that we're trying to do any science today. What if we go much, much deeper?
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Last sample. The core
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Here in the central 1% of the star, we find a third of the sun's mass.
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The matter here is compressed by the weight of the entire star above it. In the center of the core,
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the temperature is 15 million degrees,
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hot enough to make helium by smashing together hydrogen, powering the Sun by nuclear fusion.
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In billions of years after the death of the Sun, this core will remain as a white dwarf.
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If we brought a sample of it to Earth, it would cause a lot of inconvenience
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The biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated, had an energy of 40 megatons of TNT, or a cube the size of the Empire State Building.
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Our sample has the equivalent of 4,000 megatons.
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This is four billion tons of TNT, or a cube 1.3 kilometers high.
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To give you a sense of scale this is the cube inside Manhattan.
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Once the sphere arrives on Earth, this super dense matter expands instantly and creates an explosion with the force of well,
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the Sun.
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If we get the sample in Paris, in the morning the citizens of London would see what looks like a second sunrise.
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But, one that gets brighter and brighter, and hotter and hotter, until London burns to ashes.
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In a radius of about 300 kilometres around the blast, everything would be burnt.
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The shockwave would travel around the Earth multiple times.
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Most buildings in Central Europe would be flattened, eardrums would rupture, and windows break across the continent.
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The explosion would be apocalyptic.
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possibly humans civilization ending.
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If humans did survive, we could count on the dust blown into the atmosphere to create a small ice age.
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So, if there is one tiny bright side, it would be that the explosion might be an effective way to control
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human-caused climate change for a few decades.
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While this is definitely a good thing, all in all we conclude, that we should not try to bring the Sun to earth
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We've made a lot of questionable assumptions in this video, but our maths is real. If you're like us
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and you enjoy using the power of math to calculate
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absurd ways to destroy stuff you may be interested in all the other things you can do with maths. For example,
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You could calculate how to mine mercury for silicon to build a Dyson Sphere,
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determine how long it will take the Sun to burn out or simply do your taxes.
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But as much as we love explaining these things, the best way to learn anything is by doing it yourself.
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Brilliant is a problem-solving website that teaches you to think like a scientist by guiding you through problems they take concepts like these
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break them up into bite-sized nuggets present clear thinking in each part, and then build back up to an interesting conclusion.
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