Question: How long does it take to get to the sun? how close would you have to be to the sun to explode?

Evan Keane answered on 24 Jun 2011:

Well we can work do a quick calculation using the fact that the Sun is a “blackbody”. That means it is basically a perfect radiator and also that the “Stefan-Boltzmann Equation” describes how it behaves. If you look at this equation you can see that the temperature you are, depends on your distance from the Sun by the inverse square root. What do I mean? Well if you go twice as near to the Sun, your temperature will be the square root of 2 higher (which is 1.4), if you go 4 times closer to the Sun, you will be the square root of 4 (which is 2) higher. So it depends on how hot you need to be to melt (or explode as you say!). Let’s guess that we are about 37 degrees Celsius which is 310 Kelvin. I think that if you became 100 degrees Celsius you would probably melt (this is the boiling point of water, and we are made of a lot of water), which is 373 Kelvin. So the increase in temperature is a factor of 373/310 = 1.20. So the distance we need to go to is 1, divided by this squared, which is about 0.7. So we need to go to 70% of the distance we are now. The Earth is 149 million kilometres from the Sun so 70% of this is 104 million kilometres. So you would need to go about 45 million kilometres closer to the Sun to melt.

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