What if water was poured into the Sun?

The surface of the sun has a temperature of about six thousand degrees Celsius. That is more than enough to overcome the attraction between the positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons of water molecules.

Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. If you inject water into the Sun, you would basically be adding more fuel to the fire.

The hydrogen atoms in the water would join in the fusion process, while the oxygen atoms would be stripped of their electrons and become highly energetic ions.

The result would be an increase in the Sun’s brightness and temperature, not a decrease.

Injecting a mass of water equivalent to that of the Earth into the Sun would increase its brightness by about 0.6 percent.

That may not sound like much, but it is the equivalent of adding approximately 40 billion hydrogen bombs per second to the Sun’s output.

Now, what if we injected 1000 masses of Jupiter worth of water into the Sun?

That’s about 317,000 times the mass of the Earth. So, multiplying by 0.6 percent, the brightness of the Sun would increase by about 190 percent.

This means that the Sun would shine almost three times brighter than it does now. The Sun’s mass would nearly double, its radius would expand by 48%, and its surface temperature would increase to 8,400 K. It would basically transform into a spectral class A star.

This would be bad news for life on Earth and other planets in the solar system.

The surface temperature of Earth would increase to 102 °C within a week or two, just enough to evaporate all surface water, with a large part of it probably escaping into space.