Is it possible to extinguish the Sun with water?

When it comes to extinguishing fire, the first thing that comes to mind is water. So, how much water would it take to extinguish the Sun? Is it really possible to put out the Sun with water?

To find the answers to these questions, we first need to understand how the Sun burns.
 

As I mentioned earlier, our initial idea about the Sun is actually wrong. This object is not like the ball of fire we are familiar with. It doesn’t burn the way fire burns on Earth. On Earth, oxygen is needed for combustion or fire. Three things are essential for combustion fuel, air or oxygen, and heat. Fire on Earth occurs through the combination of these three. Wood or oil acts as fuel. When enough heat and oxygen are present, it catches fire. But the case of the Sun is completely different.
 

The source of the Sun’s energy is nuclear fusion. In this process, hydrogen gas acts as the fuel. Because of the Sun’s immense mass, the hydrogen atoms are squeezed together under tremendous pressure. Under such extreme conditions, hydrogen atoms combine to form helium atoms.
 

This process takes place at the core of the Sun, where the pressure is about 333,000 times greater than that of Earth, and the temperature is around 15 million degrees Celsius. In these unimaginable conditions, hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium  this is known as the fusion reaction. Through this process, an enormous amount of energy is continuously released from the Sun.
 

In fact, during the process of nuclear fusion, when hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, a small portion of their mass is lost. According to the famous equation E = mc², that lost mass is converted into energy. This is the energy we receive as light and heat. Not only that, the Sun also emits neutrinos, positrons, and gamma rays through this process.

In short, the Sun is essentially a massive nuclear reactor, constantly “burning” hydrogen to produce energy.

According to scientists, the Sun converts about 600 million tons (or 600,000,000,000 kilograms) of hydrogen into helium every second through nuclear fusion. As a result of this conversion, around 596 million tons of helium is produced per second, and the remaining 4 million tons of mass (according to the equation E = mc²) is transformed into energy.
 

Now imagine, somehow we could gather an amount of water equal to the mass of the Sun! Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? But let’s assume, just in imagination, that we managed to collect that much water. However, in space this water would turn into solid ice, because the temperature out there is extremely low. So, if we pushed this gigantic ball of ice toward the Sun, what would happen? Would the Sun go out?

The first problem is that as soon as the ice approached the Sun, it would instantly vaporize. The Sun’s atmosphere is so hot that the ice wouldn’t survive for even a moment. Still, let’s assume that somehow we could send that vapor into the Sun’s core. Would the Sun be extinguished then? Once again, the answer is no. The Sun’s environment is so extreme that even water vapor couldn’t remain intact there. Under that immense heat, the water would split into its basic elements  hydrogen and oxygen.
 

By now you know that the Sun’s fuel is hydrogen. That means, instead of putting out the Sun with water, we’d actually be giving it more fuel to burn! By adding hydrogen, the Sun would burn even more fiercely  it’s like pouring oil on a fire instead of putting it out.
 

Not only that, the oxygen obtained from the water would trigger a new kind of nuclear fusion inside the Sun. Normally, the type of fusion that takes place in the Sun is called proton–proton fusion. But with the presence of oxygen, a different process would begin  the carbon–nitrogen–oxygen or CNO fusion cycle. This type of fusion is much more powerful.

With the addition of new hydrogen, the Sun’s mass would increase by about one and a half times (to be precise, about 1.7 times). As a result, the Sun would become one and a half times larger than before, and its brightness would increase nearly sixfold.
 

Along with that, the Sun’s color would also change. Right now, we see the Sun as yellowish, but the enlarged Sun would appear bluish-white. Its temperature would also rise far higher than it is now. The Sun would start emitting extremely intense ultraviolet radiation, making the Earth about six times hotter than it is today. Under such heat, nothing on Earth would survive everything would burn to ashes.

So, as you can see, trying to extinguish the Sun with water is definitely not a good idea.