[Tyler Smallman]

Tyler Smallman  asked the Naked Scientists:
   I recently watched a movie titled "Sunshine"; the premise is that many years into the future that our Sun is dying and in a last ditch hope for human survival we send a team of astronauts to the Sun with a nuclear bomb to reignite the Sun.

A friend and I got into a debate as to whether or not this idea is plausible.

I don't think it is, even assuming that the Sun had Hydrogen left to use and that we could even get close enough to detonate this bomb, could we even fashion a bomb large enough to do this?

I know that we can fit roughly 1,300,000 earths inside the sun so even if we had a bomb the size of the moon I still did not see this being plausible.

Dr. Dave or Dr. Chris, could you shed some light on this debate?

Listening from the Illinois , United States.

Tyler Smallman
What do you think?

[Bored chemist]

If there were still enough hydrogen left to "ignite" it wouldn't have gone out.
Any bomb we made would be trivial compared to the sun anyway. I guess it's possible that you could collect together enough hot hydrogen that it was very nearly a star and then "light" it with a bomb but it's hard to see why you would bother.

[neilep]

It's a really good film !

[Chemistry4me]

Getting it off the Earth could be a bit of trouble.

[AllenG]

I believe you would need one sun's amount of hydrogen to keep it going, so...

I understand a self replicating monolith is an effective tool for igniting suns though.
They however seem to be a dirty technology in that they have been shown to cause hallucinations in astronauts and right sketchy behavior in AI computer systems.

[HankRearden]

The whole idea that some type of self-sustaining nuclear reaction could be carried out, only works because there would be gases to "burn" here on Earth, if there physically is nothing to feed the reaction, the law of the conservation of energy tells us that the reaction would stop, and no sun, no matter how many ICBMs you shot into it.

[scalyblue]

think about it this way; the sun is already a nuclear explosion--one so big its own gravity is holding it together.  I haven't done the math, but I'd imagine that throwing the entire earth into the sun wouldn't increase its life by any cosmologically appreciable amount.

The bomb in sunshine is clearly fueled by nonsensolium