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Is it possible to create a working star destroyer in real life?
Question Date: 2017-09-26
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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