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  • Could all the water in the Milky Way be used to extinguish the Sun?

  • 71 percent of the Earth's surface is covered with water.

  • According to geologists, if all the water in and on the Earth

  • in its oceans, icecaps and glaciers, lakes, rivers, groundwater and the water in the atmosphere

  • were put into one sphere, it would be 860 miles across.

  • That sphere would contain 365 million trillion gallons of water.

  • If all that water was poured on the Sun, would the Sun be extinguished?

  • Unlikely!” say chemists.

  • Because the Sun is 1.3 million times bigger than the Earth

  • Even if we had thousand times more water, the Sun is so hot it would boil off the water and turn it into vapor.

  • How about if we gathered together all the water in our Milky Way galaxy and poured it on the Sun?

  • Would that put the fire out?”

  • Well, the Milky Way is full of planets containing water beneath their surfaces and in the form of ice and vapour.

  • And then there is the water in between the stars and planetscontained in interstellar gas and interstellar dust.

  • Would that be enough?”

  • With a rough calculation, all the water in the Milky Way amounts to a volume 100 million times greater than the volume of the Sun.

  • The water in the Milky Way is also 100 times bigger than the galaxy's biggest black hole.

  • So, imagine if you could pour all the Milky Way's water onto the Sun, surely the Sun would collapse into a huge black hole.

  • This black hole would not be glowing, so you would be able to say that the Sun had been destroyed.

  • Right?

  • Hang on a minute.

  • Maybe not !

  • Maybe we're looking at this from the wrong angle.

  • Let's turn it around.

  • Can we extinguish the Sun with water?

  • Any solar expert will tell you that the Sun is not even on fire.

  • Our wonderful Sun is simply a nuclear fusion reaction, converting hydrogen atoms into helium under the immense temperatures and pressures at its core.

  • If we were to pour water on it, the added mass would simply increase the pressure at the core and accelerate the nuclear fusion going on in there, producing even more energy.

  • Then again, maybe, instead of getting tangled up in all this hypothetical arithmetic,

  • Perhaps we should just marvel at the beauty of the Milky Way as a whole

  • through this beautiful photo, for example, taken with a modest smartphone

Could all the water in the Milky Way be used to extinguish the Sun?

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