Can a supervillain destroy the sun?

The sun’s light and warmth make life possible on Earth. But these same qualities also make the sun a tempting target for fictional supervillains. If an evildoer could control the sun, they could control the Earth — and even the whole solar system!  

But could it be done?  

Well, attempting to destroy the sun would be a huge undertaking. Our sun is classified as a yellow dwarf star. That name is a little misleading. “Dwarf” implies that the sun is small. But for a star, it’s pretty average-sized. Some stars are up to 100 times the diameter of our sun, and some are just a tenth its size.

But compared with Earth, the sun is massive. It is by far the largest thing in our solar system. According to NASA, 99.8 percent of the mass in our entire solar system is in the sun. Everything else — all the planets, moons, asteroids and even dust — fits in that remaining 0.2 percent.  

The next biggest object in the solar system is the planet Jupiter. Jupiter is a gas giant, 2.5 times more massive than all the other planets combined. But it’s still tiny next to the sun. In fact, even if a supervillain somehow managed to throw Jupiter into the sun, it wouldn’t cause a cataclysm.  

“We probably wouldn’t see any measurable effect,” says Carl Rodriguez. It wouldn’t change anything about the sun’s life cycle or lifespan. Rodriguez is an astronomer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 
 
With today’s technology, “there’s basically nothing we can do to influence the sun itself,” says Rodriguez. That supervillain would need to have some superpowers to get the job done. 

Vanishing stars 

Some extremely large stars end in a supernova. This is a huge explosion caused when the star runs out of fuel and its core collapses in on itself. Sometimes these stars become neutron stars. Others collapse into black holes. This is part of the natural life cycle of those stars. But neither of these things will happen to our sun. The sun isn’t big enough to explode in a supernova, and it doesn’t have enough mass to become a black hole. One day, in billions of years, the sun will turn into a red giant, then shrink down into a white dwarf.  

But what if a supervillain had some sort of magic powers that could make the sun poof out of existence?  
 
The sun’s light takes about eight minutes to reach Earth. So, eight minutes after the sun disappeared, it would vanish from our sky. Darkness would fall. Without the sun’s heat, global temperatures would plummet. Without sunlight, plants and algae would stop photosynthesizing and creating food. The entire global food web would collapse. Eventually, all life on Earth would die. 
   
And without the sun’s gravity, everything in our solar system would be flung out into space. For Earth, this would also happen about eight minutes after the loss of the sun. There would be total chaos.  

If the villain’s goal was to control the Earth’s population, destroying the sun doesn’t seem like the best option.  

Time comes for all 

“The sun is going to do what it’s going to do,” says Rodriguez. “Some of that might not be good for us, but there’s nothing we can do one way or the other.” And it will keep shining for some 5 billion years. Until it begins to turn into a red giant. 
 
This process starts when the sun’s core begins to run out of hydrogen. That element powers the nuclear reaction that keeps our star bright. The conversion of hydrogen into helium at the core of our sun creates outward pressure. That outward pressure balances the inward pressure of gravity. These two forces balance each other — until the sun starts running low on hydrogen.  
 

At this point, the sun’s core starts to collapse and heat up. This sparks another round of hydrogen fusion in the star’s outer layers. The gassy outer layers of the sun will balloon outward, expanding to about 200 times its former size. As a red giant, the sun will be brighter than before but have a cooler surface.  
 
Scientists are not sure how far the sun will expand, says Rodriguez. Some models predict the radius of the sun will reach the orbit of the Earth, engulfing the planet. Others say that the sun would only expand as far as Venus’ orbit.  
 
Even if the sun doesn’t swallow Earth, the extreme heat and brightness from the red giant would vaporize the oceans and strip away the atmosphere. Earth wouldn’t be habitable for humans or any other known life-forms. But that’s a problem for any humans still around 5 billion years from now.  

In the end, no matter how strong or smart a supervillain is, the sun is beyond their reach. And maybe that’s a good thing — because without the sun, there’d be no Earth, no life and no supervillains either.