Answer 1:
It is not possible. To destroy a star,
you need something powerful to reach the star
first and then destroy it. Most of the stars are
actually quite far away. To get close to a star is
already not easy, let alone destroying it. Ok,
take our closest sun as an example.
Let me list some of the basic properties of the
sun first:
a) Mass: 2*1030 kg (~ 330 000 time
that of Earth),
b) Distance to Earth: 1.5*108 km (~ 8
minutes for light to travel),
c) Temperature: the visible surface of Sun is
about 6000 Kelvin, and a few million degrees in
the
corona .
Ok, in order to reach the sun. At this moment the
spaceship we have can reach a record speed of ~17
km per second. It would still take at least 100
days to get to the sun, assuming that the
spaceship goes at the record speed. But in
reality, the average speed is much lower and it is
much difficult to maintain the record speed (there
is the fuel problem). So it would take much longer
to reach the sun.
Then, the second question is how would you
reach the sun and survive? The lowest
temperature on the surface of Sun is 6000 Kelvin,
high enough to melt or vaporize most of materials
on Earth. The corona temperature is even higher,
and it serves as the protection layer. To survive
through such layer is already a big question and
it has strong constraints on how we can destroy
the sun.
Ok, let's forget about the difficulties
mentioned above. How would we destroy a giant
object as the sun. Here are some possible ways
that we can imagine: nuclear weapons and the
possible future laser weapons . It won't work,
as the nuclear reaction is happening in the sun
all the time and that is why the sun is emitting
the light in all directions and keep us warm at
such a distance.
When dealing with such astronomical objects,
the usual weapons and concepts will not work. If
you want to compare them, the details won't
matter. So let's discuss the mass or energy
instead. If we can move our Earth somehow and
throw it into Sun (it is already almost
impossible), this is much more powerful compared
to the weapons I mentioned before, and still
nothing will happen. It's like throwing an ant
into our face, we probably won't even feel the
pain, let along completely destroying our body. In
an alternative view, the power the sun emits at
every second is about 3.9*1026 Watts,
while our world power consumption per year is only
about 5.4*1020 Watts. Even if we
can turn all of the energy consumption into some
weapon, its energy scale is still negligible. And
don't forget we are comparing year to second and
most importantly the main energy source we rely on
(Oil, gas, coal, etc) exists because of the
sun.
To conclude, there is no such way we can
destroy a star. We can probably try destroying
some meteor or comet first.
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