1. #1
    Dreadlord Cuzzin's Avatar
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    Question about the sun

    So Ive been watching alot of discovery channel and have a question for anyone. So being as how the sun is constantly going through fusion processes inside of it creating all the different elements etc with the heavier ones sinking to the middle and once iron starts to form the sun dies within seconds of creating iron cus its the last element it can make basically and then starts consuming its onw energy the explodes. Soooooooo my question is what would happen if you just went and introduced iron to a random star? Could we kill our sun by simply throwing a iron frying pan into it? Or is there something that im over looking that would prevent that.

  2. #2
    Deleted
    Nothing would happen.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEw6X2BhIy8

    Y
    ou might want to watch the whole episode of that. It's called Wonders of the Universe: Stardust.

  3. #3
    I don't think our sun is big enough to ever start fusing elements to iron. Our sun, iirc, will get to fusing helium and expand to a red giant, then after that it will slowly die.

  4. #4
    Deleted
    Theres a few things you're overlooking, one being how the feck would you get a piece of iron close enough to the sun for it to even fuse with it o_O.

  5. #5
    Not really sure what you are saying, but you seem to be talking about when the sun ran out of fuel, so to speak, and dies. That's no going to happen prematurely just because you threw some stuff at it. For one thing, a frying pan will just vaporise before it even gets close to the sun.

  6. #6
    you would have to have the iron frying pan somehow teleported into the center of the sun. that's where the fusion is otherwise it would completely melt before hitting the surface and pushed away by the solar wind

  7. #7
    Dreadlord Cuzzin's Avatar
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    oh shoot i see what you mean that was only for the really large suns that get big enough to create iron wich mean ours will never get that far

  8. #8
    Bloodsail Admiral Aurust's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cuzzin View Post
    So Ive been watching alot of discovery channel and have a question for anyone. So being as how the sun is constantly going through fusion processes inside of it creating all the different elements etc with the heavier ones sinking to the middle and once iron starts to form the sun dies within seconds of creating iron cus its the last element it can make basically and then starts consuming its onw energy the explodes. Soooooooo my question is what would happen if you just went and introduced iron to a random star? Could we kill our sun by simply throwing a iron frying pan into it? Or is there something that im over looking that would prevent that.
    Throwing an iron frying pan will do nothing, neither will throwing in a crap ton of iron it will melt. The star will die once its source of fusionable fuel runs out ( when all the hydrogen/helium gets converted if im not mistaken)

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Aurust View Post
    Throwing an iron frying pan will do nothing, neither will throwing in a crap ton of iron it will melt. The star will die once its source of fusionable fuel runs out ( when all the hydrogen/helium gets converted if im not mistaken)
    This. Just because you introduce something into the sun's environment doesn't mean you've changed anything about it's fuel supply. It will still contain the same amount of fusion-able material.

    This is the same as asking the question: what would happen if you put a small amount of exhaust fumes into the combustion chamber of a combustion engine? And again, the answer is "business as usual", so to speak (assuming the combustion chamber still has enough capacity for the elements necessary for combustion) .

  10. #10


    For one our sun will never explode and I'm fairly sure that our sun will never produce iron but rather die with helium.

  11. #11
    Bloodsail Admiral Aurust's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sydänyö View Post
    Iron molecules do not melt.
    Well not the molecules duh, i meant the frying pan. All metals are melted in a sense since they are * pulls out chemistry book* a ahem mobile sea of electrons

    pwooosh take that science!

  12. #12
    Deleted
    Want to know what would happen?

    Let's say you get a million tonnes of iron. The mass of the sun is 1.98892 × 10^30. So 1 million tonnes is basically nothing, but what would happen? Boiling point of Iron is around 2750.0° C. Surface of the sun is 5505 °C. So you'd have instant vaporization of the iron into a gaseous form.

    You're welcome.

  13. #13
    It's not the presence of iron that means the star's life is over. It's the actual fusion process that does it.

    For example, here's the two main fusion "types" happening in our sun:

    A) (with the hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, which respectively have one neutron and two neutrons):
    - 1 deuterium atom fuses together with 1 tritium atom to release one atom of helium, one neutron and approximately 17 MeV of energy

    B) (with normal hydrogen-1):
    - 2 pairs of 2 hydrogen atoms fuse together to form two deuterium atoms plus one neutrino and a positron. Then (if I'm not mistaken, I'm getting this by memory) the two deuterium atoms bond together to form one helium atom plus some gamma radiation and approximately 5.7 MeV of energy.

    Now what do these two have in common other than consuming hydrogen to create helium? Energy. They create energy, and this is the axis of the iron issue.

    The fusion of any element with a lower atomic number than iron GENERATES energy, sometimes a large amount of it. The thing is that the elements heavier than iron CONSUME energy when fusing, which means that this is where the life cycle of star ends. It's not that iron immediately stops things, and you could probably throw one ton of iron at the sun and nothing would happen. It's the lack of anything LIGHTER than iron that will make the reaction in the start no longer emit energy and, well, cause all the other side effects you probably already know.

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