Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - What Happens If We Bring the Sun to Earth?

Short Summary

Main recommendation: Do not try to bring any piece of the Sun to Earth, because every layer would be lethal in a different way, from a shockwave to a global catastrophe. The video samples three layers of the Sun's plasma (the chromosphere, photosphere, and radiative zone) plus the core, and explains what each would do after arrival on Earth.

Key Points

• The Sun is plasma, a hot, free-flowing state of matter where nuclei and electrons separate, and it becomes denser and "weirder" the deeper you go.
• The chromosphere sample is less dense than air, so it would implode as Earth's air rushes in, releasing energy equal to about 12 kilograms of TNT as a shockwave that shatters glass and ruptures eardrums.
• The photosphere sample, at about 5,000 degrees Celsius with roughly sea-level pressure, would release about 25 kilograms of TNT as heat and briefly glow with a million times the Sun's brightness seen from Earth, igniting fires before cooling to harmless gas.
• The radiative zone sample, around two million degrees Celsius, would explode with the power of a thermonuclear weapon as soon as its pressure is released, destroying the lab and the surrounding city, without radioactive fallout.
• The core sample, from the central 1% of the Sun, would equal about 4,000 megatons of TNT, more than 100 times the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated (40 megatons).

Details Worth Noting

• Concrete instructions: No preparation or safe-handling steps are given. The only actionable advice is to keep your distance from the chromosphere sample's blast, and the video's explicit conclusion is that humanity should not attempt to bring the Sun to Earth.
• The core sample's energy is compared to a cube of TNT about 1.3 kilometers high, roughly the size of the cube inside Manhattan, and the explosion would burn everything within about 300 kilometers.
• The core sample's blast would look like a second sunrise to observers in London if the sample landed in Paris, then destroy London, flatten most buildings in Central Europe, and send a shockwave around the Earth several times.
• The video jokingly notes that dust from the blast could cause a small ice age, which the narrator sarcastically suggests might offset human-caused climate change for a few decades.
• The Sun's core, billions of years after the Sun dies, will remain as a white dwarf, and the core's temperature of 15 million degrees is what powers fusion.

Bottom Line

Every layer of the Sun is deadly on arrival, and the outermost layers are dangerous mainly through shockwaves and heat while the inner layers would be civilization-ending, so the answer to bringing the Sun to Earth is clearly no.