• Question: what would happen if there was no sun?

    Asked by jadoolan to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hi @jadoolan
      Brace yourself – it’s not pretty.
      Basically, everything would die. We get all our energy from the sun in some form or other. Plants would not be able to photosynthesize so there would be no oxygen. All the water would freeze. I think even the centre of the earth would solidify. We’d all get rickets from a lack of Vitamin D (actually we wouldn’t survive to the point where that would happen)!

      Thankfully though there is a sun! Phew!

      🙂

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      You can get a little way towards answering this question by looking at the outer planets of our Solar System, where there is a Sun (otherwise there wouldn’t be a Solar System, as that means a Sun-based System!) but there isn’t enough of it for life; at least, not life as we know it. Those planets are mostly too cold to sustain the kind of life we have here on Earth – they’re just rocky wastes.

      It’d be just as bad, though, if there was too much Sun – like on Mercury and Venus; everything would be too hot, and there would be no life either. So you can see why, from this point of view, the Earth is just the right distance from the Sun, and this means some people call it (and other planets in the same position around other stars) a ‘Goldilocks planet’: ‘not too hot, not too cold, just right’.

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