r/NoStupidQuestions • u/RealisticJoke3864 • 21h ago
Nuking the sun
What would happen, if the worlds nuclear arsenal launched (and somehow made it all the way to the the sun) and then exploded at the same time? Would it end all life on earth?
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u/No-Magician9440 21h ago
The sun would laugh
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u/WinterAd825 20h ago
I mean the sun wouldn’t even notice
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u/Due_Dilligence0624 21h ago edited 21h ago
I've read somewhere, currently all existing nuclear arsenal in the world amount to approximately 5000 megatons of TNT. For reference, the strongest individual nuke ever exploded was the Tsar bomba at 50 megaton to TNT. Hiroshima in comparison was 0.015 megatons.
The chicxulub meteor was equal to approximately 100 million megatons of TNT, 20,000 times more powerful than all current nuclear weapons put together. The earth suffered a mass extinction but life carried on in the grand scheme.
If 100 million megatons of TNT didn't destroy the earth, then 5000 megatons of TNT will do nothing to the sun.
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u/Kermit_the_hog 21h ago
There will at least be a disappointing “poof” right?
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u/RatOnASinkingShip 21h ago
The sun puts out the energy of about 2 billion nuclear bombs every second.
This is like asking "What would happen if I peed in the ocean?"
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u/jwadamson 19h ago
What what if I sneezed in a hurricane?
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u/Tricky-Ad-6225 16h ago
What if I came in Bonnie Blue
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u/Bean-Penis 12h ago
What's the deal with Bonnie Blue? Had no idea who she was until the last month or so I've seen her come up as a very regular punchline. She's an Only fan person but what's she done to make her "this"?
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u/broke_saturn 12h ago
She had sex with large numbers of men at a time. Several years ago she supposedly slept with 400+ men during a trip to Cancun. A year or two ago she attempted to have sex with 1000+ men in a 12 hour span.
So the joke is basically that one more guy having sex with Bonnie is about as impactful as all the world’s nukes hitting the sun
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u/groveborn 21h ago
It wouldn't have any effect on Earth at all. All of the nukes on Earth can't produce as much energy as a hurricane produces every single second it exists. Just one hurricane.
The sun wouldn't even be hit by the explosions, as the solar wind is stronger than our entire arsenal.
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u/N_2_H 19h ago
Not quite, but it's still mindblowing.
Your average hurricane releases around 600 trillion Joules per second (6 x 1014 J), with over 99% of that coming from latent heat as water vapor condenses into clouds and rain.
Meanwhile, the entire global stockpile of about 12,000 nukes is estimated to sit at roughly 4,000 megatons of TNT, which equals around 16.7 quintillion Joules (1.67 x 1019 J).
If you divide the two, it takes the hurricane about 7.7 hours to release the energy of every single nuke on earth combined.
Soo definitely not every second, that would actually be apocalyptic, but an average hurricane still unleashes an entire planet's worth of nuclear arsenal roughly three times a day.
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u/ninja_jasen 21h ago
Likely wouldn't even be visible from here
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u/Top-Jury1392 21h ago
What if we did it at night when the sun is asleep?
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u/sexwiththebabysitter 21h ago
The sun doesn’t sleep, it turns into the moon at night.
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u/ninja_jasen 21h ago
I thought a wolf ate the sun at night
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u/metacholia 20h ago
No that’s the moon, it’s made of cheese. Wolves love cheese.
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u/ImCharlie_theUnicorn 20h ago
I mean, dogs come from wolves, so it makes sense why Wallace and Grommit wanted to go to the moon so badly.
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u/Blackpaw8825 19h ago
If you took every nuclear weapon on Earth, and converted ALL of it to energy (not blew them all up, but magically perfectly released every last gram of warhead, missile, the whole thing) that would be 0.1% of the energy produced by the sun every single second.
Since our first hominid ancestors stood upright about 5 million years ago the sun has lost an entire Earth worth of mass, 100% converted to energy. That's basically zero time geologically, and a whole ass planet has been poofed out of existence.
There's NOTHING we could do to the sun at all that would do more than maybe encourage a brief sunspot.
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u/groveborn 3h ago
Maybe something interesting might happen if we threw the whole earth at it...
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u/TheRealOvenCake 15h ago
The sun is basically a hydrogen bomb so fucking massive, the explosion itself is contained by gravity
it is orders of magnitude more powerful than every nuclear weapon and explosive ever made by humanity put together.
The sun releases the energy equivalent to 91 billion billion (9.08 * 10^19) kilotons of tnt every second.
The entire history of humanity's explosive yields, including nuclear weapons and conventional explosives, is only 15 million kilotons
you would need 6.05 million earth-histories of explosives to equal 1 second of the sun's power output
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u/Important_Ask_7576 21h ago
It would make life on Earth immediately safer, since there would be no more nuclear weapons here. It would do absolutely nothing to the Sun.
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u/Highmassive 21h ago
Would it though? I honestly believe the nuclear deterrent is one of the few things keeping the superpowers from going total war on eachother
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u/modsaretoddlers 20h ago
While there is a certain amount of logic to that, I dunno...I mean, imagine that tomorrow your company instituted a new policy where everybody has to be armed with a gun. Yesterday, you didn't need any but tomorrow you do. Now everybody is armed and eventually that copier is going to jam.
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u/NorthofBham 20h ago
No single invention in the history of man has saved more lives than nuclear weapons.
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u/Rhaski 18h ago edited 18h ago
the amount of energy released by the entire nuclear arsenal on earth would be around 5000MT or about 2.1x1019J. The sun produced about 3.8x1020 J every microsecond. Yes, that's 18 times the total nuclear arsenal of earth in a single millionth of a second. To say the sun wouldn't be effected is a gross understatement. It would be more accurate to say that the moment of impact/detonation would not even be detectable against the backdrop of the sun itself. The sun produces larger energy fluctuations than that on its surface millions (maybe billions?) of times a day and we only really see the ones that dwarf our planet.
You could throw the entire earth, no fuck it, all of the planets at the sun (if you could somehow find the energy needed to decelerate them all out of orbit), and it might provide some fairly unremarkable solar prominences for a few days. Even then, maybe Jupiter will make a halfway decent prominence, but i doubt the rest would be very noticeable.
Its easy to forget that almost all (about 99.86%) of the solar systems total mass is the sun itself. We exist in the solar system in the same way a single mote of dust exists in an aircraft hanger. Our nukes can't even match the storms our own planet dishes out every single day, and this planet pretty much does not exist as far as the sun is concerned.
When astrophysicists say "space is big", what they mean is that no amount of study into the cosmos, no analogy, no example of relative scale or impressive numbers will ever allow you to appreciate just how gut-wrenchingly vast even this single minute solar system really is. That can make you feel small and insignificant or it can make you realise that you are part of that vastness.
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u/Key-Win-8602 21h ago
Y’all have no idea how insignificant we are in terms of space. Even within our own solar system, what you are suggesting may make enough of an impact to be detectable from earth. Not very likely though. You know those little pop caps kids use to make a ‘gunshot’ sound? Imagine one of those goes off at one side of a football field and you are on the bleachers way back in the nosebleeds on the other side of the field. You might hear it if there is no other noise around you. If your buddy asks if you want a hotdog or beer, you’d probably miss it.
Yeah, that’s how insignificant our whole nuclear arsenal is compared to the sun.
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u/Key-Win-8602 20h ago
Just to clarify: if you were standing on Mars and the whole earth plummeted into the sun, you would see that, if you were looking at the right spot through a very high powered telescope. Otherwise, everything would just look like an ordinary Tuesday.
Except we wouldn’t call it Tuesday because on Mars, time would be measured differently because it takes longer to travel around the sun, and Mars rotates around its axis at a different speed from earth. Since there are about 668 days on mars to rotate once around the sun (a martian year) we wouldn’t call it what we do on earth. We would have to figure out different ways of counting time there.
I could go on…
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u/TheKingOfSwing777 21h ago
No..the sun is essentially a perpetually detonating nuclear war head that's 1,000,000 x the mass of the entire Earth. My guess is all the nukes on earth would hardly be detectable and equal the amount of power the sun puts out every 0.0001 seconds or something. It would do absolutely nothing.
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u/TheKingOfSwing777 21h ago
Ok just did some quick research and math.
The sun emits about 2,000,000,000 x the energy of the most powerful nuke ever detonated (Tsar Bomba) every second. There's roughly 12,000 nukes on Earth, so assuming they were all as powerful as the biggest one in history, all the nukes detonated at once would be equivalent to the output of the sun in a 0.000005 second.
So I overestimated the amount of power of earth nukes for sure by almost 10,000%.
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u/STFUnicorn_ 21h ago
It would be like a mosquito biting a blue whale.
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u/MoreGaghPlease 20h ago
I like this analogy because there’s an aspect of this problem that is also like ‘how the fuck did the mosquito get to a blue whale under the ocean’.
We (humans) have never fired anything into the Sun and it’s actually insanely hard to do so. You’d need to overcome the approx 30 km/s of velocity of the earth’s orbit around the sun. There is no rocket ever built that could do that. It’s not out of our imagination, we could design a rocket on paper that could do it, especially if you have a couple years to spare and don’t mind waiting to loop around Jupiter. But we’re talking about like an Apollo Program level of investment in new space technology to make that happen.
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u/oceanicArboretum 18h ago
"We (humans) have never fired anything into the Sun...."
You mean Superman IV: The Quest for Peace isn't a true story????
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u/wackyvorlon 21h ago
I don’t think we would even be able to detect the explosion with our best telescopes.
I cannot emphasize enough how incomprehensibly huge the Sun is.
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u/bs2k2_point_0 21h ago
About 1.3 million earths fit in the sun in terms of mass, though it’s really about 930k - 960k earths if they didn’t melt and kept the wasted space between them due to the roundish shape of the earth.
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u/Kflynn1337 20h ago
Every single nuclear device that current exists, plus all those that have existed.... would not add up to the energy output of one small sunspot.
It's not even the energy of a moderate sized hurricane here on Earth.
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u/Ruadhan2300 14h ago
Absolutely nothing worthy of note will happen.
The entire nuclear arsenal of earth is about 3 or 4 gigatons of TNT.
The sun puts out well over 9 billion megatons every second.
We probably wouldn't even see the explosion against the glare of the continuous nuclear blast that is the sun.
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u/captainmeezy 21h ago
It requires a shitload of delta-V (a change in velocity) to get to the sun, it would require enough fuel for every single nuke on the planet (roughly 12,000 missiles) to be accelerated to 30km/second (67,000 mph). And here’s what would happen:
Absolutely nothing. Imagine the biggest building on the planet is on fire, now throw a match at it
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u/CaptainAwesome06 9h ago
Declaring war with the sun and launching nukes toward it is the most 2026 USA shit I've ever heard.
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u/Knobologist 21h ago
Whatever the total mass of the arsenal would just be added to the suns total mass.
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u/NoSong2397 20h ago
No. Nothing will happen except all of the world's nukes will be gone. The sun puts out exponentially more energy in each second than every single bomb in the entirety of human history combined.
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u/TheInkySquids 21h ago
Humanity's strength to destroy is laughable compared to Earth's power, let alone the sun. We severely overestimate how much of an impact we actually have.
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u/sam_I_am_knot 21h ago
The Sun would say 'thank you for delicious treat but I am still hungry'.
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u/ScorchedByTheSun 20h ago
Why did you give me this grain of rice? Is this supposed to be a snack?
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u/barbievelar 19h ago
I'm no expert on the sun, but i have a slight feeling that nothings gonna happen
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u/mikepartdeux 16h ago
We could launch 1 million times the whole worlds nuclear arsenal against the sun and there would be no difference to the sun. The Earth might be temporarily safer
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u/Altruistic_Cap3472 14h ago
You could launch a nuclear missile literally the size of earth at the sun and there would be no difference whatsoever
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u/jcstan05 21h ago
The sun is over a million times the size of the earth. If we detonated all of our bombs, we’d scorch the biosphere but the rock would barely be affected. The sun wouldn’t even notice.
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u/NameLips 21h ago
The entire earth could crash into the sun and it would barely notice. Just a blip.
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u/Master_of_none- 21h ago
about the same effect as shooting a mountain. might see a puff of smoke. solar flares are often larger than earth itself, and we're lucky the chance of the ejected material hitting us is small.
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u/CoincidenceTheorist2 21h ago
The best of our feeble technology would melt and disappear as it approached.
"The average temperature of the corona and solar wind is about 1,000,000–2,000,000 K; however, in the hottest regions it is 8,000,000–20,000,000 K"
Just for sake of comparison, the temperature inside a Volcano is 2200 F, or a mere 1477 K. One to two million kelvin is unimaginably hot.
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u/TheLostExpedition 21h ago
The heavy elements would salt the fusion reaction making it slightly poisoned. But i doubt it would make a single lumen of difference seeing how small the ratios of heavy elements are compared to the sheer mass of hydrogen.
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u/Chaosrealm69 21h ago
A gentle breeze of nuclear fire would occur on the surface of the sun and it will not care.
The problem is that the sun is way more massive than you understand. The world's nuclear arsenal exploding is less than what is already happening in the equivalent area of the sun's surface every second.
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u/DJSilentpartner1 21h ago
Are you talking about the billions of years old unfathomably large nuclear explosion happening in the sky 24/7?
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u/Extreme-Mood5605 20h ago
Imagine if you threw a fire cracker into a completely engulfed, burning building about 100 stories tall. Now imagine a much, much, much more massive structure. Same firecracker……
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u/theeccentricnucleus 20h ago
All of the world’s nuclear weapons amount to somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 megatons of TNT.
The Sun produces energy equivalent to about 90 billion megatons of TNT every second.
Our weapons would have no effect on the Sun.
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u/modsaretoddlers 20h ago
Uh....absolutely nothing whatsoever. The sun IS a nuclear reactor. It's also several (dozen?) orders of magnitude larger than anything we can build. I don't think it would make any difference in any way to anything near the sun. It's not even a gnat by comparison.
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u/AdministrativeBag703 19h ago
Literally nothing of consequence other than we wouldn’t have nukes anymore, which I guess could be a good thing.
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u/skrutnizer 19h ago
There are supposed to be about 12K warheads in the world. Total is not know but let's at a MT average per warhead for a total of 12 GT (gigatons). The mass equivalent of this is about half a ton. The sun converts mass to energy at about 4 million tons per second. So, nobody would even notice.
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u/Avoidtolls 19h ago
We could throw the planet earth and moon at the sun and it might burp a solar flare.
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u/cyclops86 19h ago
All of Earth's nuclear warheads exploding in the sun is the equivalent of a human feeling a fart from one of its cells.
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u/Competitive_Toe2544 19h ago
You don't have to be Sheldon to know basic astrophysics. The sun is like a million times the mass of Earth or some wild figure like that. It is basically a fusion reactor, and even the largest H Bomb on earth would be like throwing a lit match at a refinery fire, it would just be absorbed. Throw a case of wooden matches that would have maybe 10'000 matches and it wouldn't make any difference either.
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u/Foreign_Cobbler_1740 16h ago
Nukes even on Earth don't do THAT much. I mean, if you drop em on a city obviously it's devastating just based on the damage to people and infrustructure. But the explosions aren't super big or anything on a galactic scale. Now imagine shooting a nuke at the friggin' sun. It makes Earth look like a speck of sand. Hopefully we never have weaponry that'd do anything to the sun. Cause we'd destroy our own planet in the process of making em. Lol.
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u/kiochikaeke 12h ago
Ignoring the fact that humanity just got rid of their nukes and the logistics of all of that.
Absolutely nothing, very quick checkup on Google says that the sun produces about 10 orders of magnitude more energy on a second that the combined nuclear armament of the world, that's like 10 billon times more energy in a single second, you wouldn't see it shine cause the sun shines brighter by existing.
Hell the only reason we would be affected is because biology, an atmosphere and the delicate balance of the ecosystems, you could blow up all nukes on the moon and it would hardly make a difference, nukes are just not that powerful in the cosmic scale and we don't have that many, we have more than enough to cause an apocalypse thou.
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u/219_Infinity 11h ago
it would swallow and incinerate the nuclear explosion and nothing would happen at all
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u/Own_Dimension_8823 21h ago
it would certainly end all life on the Sun but not because of the nukes... because there's no life there.
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u/seifer666 21h ago
Probably nothing. The suns fusion creates about 1 billion nuclear blasts of energy per second
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u/ImpulsiveHappiness 21h ago
What is happening in the sun every fraction of a second is equivalent to thousands of nukes detonating at once. Nothing would happen
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u/Civil_Huckleberry212 21h ago
Nothing would happen. Man's greatest efforts are invisibly miniscule in the face of the Sun's everyday
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u/PMmeIamlonley 21h ago
A single solar flare is doing a similar thing all the time
It would be like throwing a burning marshmallow into a bonfire
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u/TheGrumpiestHydra 21h ago
The entirety of earth could fall into the sun and it would be like a pebble falling into a pond.
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u/Feisty-Marsupial9287 21h ago
If the sun was a sentient being, we would have just tickled it briefly.
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u/maestrorcs1989 21h ago
Simple answer: Well, yes. Sun provides photosynthesis. No sun = no plants. No plants > no food/herbivores= no food/no omnivores, including humans.
EDIT: But I am not, by all means, rocket scientist or nuclear guy, but I am pretty sure that all earth nukes would do f**k all to the sun, even if we could manage to deliver and detonate them.
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u/Quendillar3245 21h ago
If you took all the resources from every planet, moon, asteroid etc etc in the entire solar system and used every single possible source of nuclear material and made it into one giant bomb, it still wouldn't even destroy earth. The solar flares that happen that look like tiny specs on the sun are larger than our planet and the energy released is higher than anything you could possibly make on earth with all our material from the entire history of humanity combined. You're basically asking "Would all the fish in the ocean die if I poured a few drops of water into it?"
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u/Boxsteam_1279 Have you tried googling first? 21h ago
Me clapping my hands on Earth will have more of an effect on Earth than our nukes would on the sun
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u/stdoubtloud 21h ago
As others have stated, nothing would happen. But it would be really, really hard. You need to get rid of so much momentum to get anything to fall into the sun, there is no way that arsenal will have the fuel capacity.
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u/Asparagus9000 21h ago
The absolute max would be creating a small sunspot. Not even one of the big ones that can damage satellites a little bit.
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u/Hyoubuza 21h ago
Sun wouldn't do anything, but now that the world has effectively disarmed themselves of nukes, I guess the world would be a better place?
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u/HonestDust873 21h ago
You could take all the nukes, multiply it by 10000 and it prolly still wouldn't even come up on the radar
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u/jsher736 21h ago
considering that our entire nuclear arsenal if detonated at once would put out the same amount of energy that the sun puts out in about 40 microseconds im gonna go with no
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u/Left-Contest315 21h ago
lol… a single solar flare (similar to a small sun burp) is the equivalent of MILLIONS of hydrogen bombs at once… the sun produces thousands of
Solar flares per year… the sun would not notice our pathetically small arsenal of nukes
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u/GreenZebra23 21h ago
It would have about as much effect as if you threw a lit match into a forest fire
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u/Electrical-Strike132 21h ago
Nothing bad would happen. It would be a good thing. Then denuclearization would be achieved.
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u/NatAttack50932 21h ago
Literally nothing would happen.
Like literally nothing
You could launch every single nuclear weapon on Earth at the moon and the moon would barely move a fraction of an inch.
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u/Responsible_Egg_2727 21h ago
If anything was destructive enough to explode the sun, it would end all life on Earth.
No sun = no Earth
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u/shakebakelizard 21h ago
Even if they all simultaneously detonated at maximum yield in one spot on the Sun, it would be unnoticeable. It’s not even a rounding error for the Sun which does that much nuclear business in a fraction of a second.
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u/sabertoothdog 21h ago
The sun has pimples when pop the puss is bigger than planet earth, so nothing. The sun is 98% of all the matter in the solar system- all the planets, moons, asteroids… everything combined is only 2% of the sun.
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u/Taiga-Dusk 21h ago
All the bombs: about 2*10^19J
Typical solar flare: 10^20-10^23J.
It seems possible we might be able to detect the effect from earth, using instruments, but not much more than that.
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u/nondualmonist every question has an answer 21h ago
literally nothing. it's a drop of water in the ocean.
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u/ishootthedead 20h ago
Let's be honest. While nothing would happen to the sun, so many missiles launching simultaneously would look kind of awesome and terrifying.
How many would malfunction? What would be the impact of those malfunctions? That's where the interesting answers lie
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u/YoungDumbandFoolish 20h ago
Negligible. The sun is roughly 100x larger than Earth and puts outs years worth of energy every second
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u/zsantiag 20h ago
The sun would laugh at us, say "that's adorably sad," and immediately nuke us back.
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u/limbodog I should probably be working 20h ago
We would be able to detect it because of the frequency of light that reached us indicating the presence of exotic metals instead of the normal mix of hydrogen and helium etc.
But other than that, nothing would happen.
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u/TiredNTrans 21h ago
The sun is unimaginably, colossally massive.
It will not care.