• Question: You could die if you go so close to the sun but how close

    Asked by dani321 to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 14 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Goodness, I’m not sure really how close you would have to get. Space distances make my brain hurt because they are so big, so I would guess that you might actually die at a really large distance from the sun’s surface. I’m hoping someone else knows the real answer, because i want to find out too!

    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Well I guess that depends on what kind of protective gear you have with you! If you didn’t have any then you’d die pretty much as soon as you left Earth, our atmosphere protects us from the suns heat, and also from lots of other harmful types of radiation. As soon as you left the atmosphere you wouldn’t be protected anymore.

      So maybe you could go to another planet and be protected by its atmosphere. If you went to one of the two planets that are closer to the sun than Earth, even if you had something that let you breathe there, you definitely wouldn’t be able to survive the heat. On Mercury it gets up to 426 degrees Celsius on the part that faces the sun, which would definitely fry you. If you tried to hide behind it on the side facing away from the sun so in night time, the temperature is minus 173 degrees Celsius so you’d freeze to death.

      Visiting Mercury probably isn’t an option then, and even though its further away from the sun, Venus is even hotter because it has an atmosphere that holds in all the heat.

      So you’d have to just go as close as you could in space. The space suits that astronauts use now can withstand about 120 degrees C. If you were in the type of space shuttle that we have used to drive around in space previously, then it can actually withstand very high temperatures, up to about 1300 degrees C (that’s hotter than lava) and so you could go a bit closer. Ralph McNutt who is an American scientist at NASA says you could get to 1.3 million miles away from the sun in the space shuttle. However you’d have to do this really really quickly and fly straight away again because suits and space shuttles can only withstand it for a bit. Plus it’d be so bright you wouldn’t be able to open your eyes, and you’d have to watch out for solar flares because they could make it hotter where you were.

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