Question: How bright is the sun?

Moises Jezzini answered on 4 Nov 2016:

From my answer to “how many light bulbs would you need to be as bright as the sun?”

The sun produce 3.8 × 10^26 watts. That is 3800000000000000000000000000 watts if you don’t like scientific notation (reference: http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sun.html#power).

Let’s use 100 Watts light bulbs. We need 3.8 × 10^24 light bulbs. Assume that each bulb weighs 150 grams (around 5 oz). So the 3.8 × 10^24 light bulbs will weight 5.7×10^23 kg. That means that all our light bulbs will weight around 10 times the weight of our planet earth!

I would not like to pay that electricity bill.

Expanding a little bit more. Check the next question from from here http://what-if.xkcd.com/141/

“What if all of the sun’s output of visible light were bundled up into a laser-like beam that had a diameter of around 1m once it reaches Earth?”

“When the beam of light hit the atmosphere, it would heat a pocket of air to millions of degrees in a fraction of a second. That air would turn to plasma and start dumping its heat as a flood of x-rays in all directions. Those x-rays would heat up the air around them, which would turn to plasma itself and start emitting infrared light. It would be like a hydrogen bomb going off, only much more violent.”

So it is REALLY bright!

Please remember to vote!