this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Okay, very confusing question...

So, assuming you want to know how heavy only the "solid at room temperature" elements of the sun are, let's try this.

The sun is 1.989 × 10^30 kilograms.

According to this: https://www.thoughtco.com/element-composition-of-sun-607581 we can see the % of total mass for each element.

  • Element % of total atoms % of total mass
  • Hydrogen 91.2 71.0
  • Helium 8.7 27.1
  • Oxygen 0.078 0.97
  • Carbon 0.043 0.40
  • Nitrogen 0.0088 0.096
  • Silicon 0.0045 0.099
  • Magnesium 0.0038 0.076
  • Neon 0.0035 0.058
  • Iron 0.030 0.014
  • Sulfur 0.015 0.040

Doing the math and removing the "gas at room temperature" elements... the total mass would be:

1.7901 * 10^28 kilograms

Note: Pretty sure I've messed something up here in the calculations but the mass is so ridiculously heavy that I don't think it really matters.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Seems like you answered the question, OP comments at the bottom and thinks it might be picked up by hand in terms of weight.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Not many rocks don't have some oxygen atoms in them, so I chose to include all the astronomical "metals" in my estimate. Interesting to see how little difference it makes.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Actually there's this thing called a black dwarf. Its when a star gets really old, it can turn into a white dwarf. If this happens then 100 zillion years later, the white dwarf star eventually uses up all its energy and turns into a cold dark mass. It takes so long to for this to happen that scientists believe there to be no black dwarfs in the universe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dwarf

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The sun is just mostly gas. Do you mean how much it would weigh, if only solid mass was left?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes if the sun was put into rock form how much would it weigh and would it be able to be picked up?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I don't think you understand the size difference between the Sun and anything human relatable. Its circumference is more than a hundred times the distance around the Earth (which itself is a difficult thing to comprehend), and that's just distance, not volume. A typical sunspot is about the size of our planet or larger.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The sun isn't wet. It's not going to dry out.

Strictly speaking asking the weight of an astronomical body is nonsensical. Weight is a measure of force and only has meaning in relation to mass and acceleration (in this case due to gravity). The sun has a mass of 1,988,400×10^24kg.

As to the question about turning it into a rock, let me put it to you this way, "Which weighs more, a pound of rocks or a pound of feathers?"

Or think of it this way. I weigh about 200 pounds on the earth (pounds being a unit of force, not mass). That's the force holding me down on the planet. That's also how much the Earth weighs on me. My mass, about 91 kg, is the same on earth, the moon, outer space, the surface of the sun, etc. My weight however, depends entirely on whatever massive gravity well I happen to be standing on.

Don't ask "What is mass?", there be dragons. You'll either get trite over simplified to the point of being meaningless answers (like the reply below), you'll just barely start to understand that learn more about the world around us leads to more questions than answers. That's kind of the whole point though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Most of the sun is hydrogen and helium, which is not the kind of stuff that rocks are made of. Wikipedia says that 0.0122 of it is heavier elements, which might more often be found in rocks, so if we imagine it'd be possible to make one big rock out of all that somehow, its mass would be 1.2% that of the sun = 2.4 * 10^28 kg, or 4000 times more than Earth.