O.k. so the sun goes out without warning - what exactly would happen?

Answer 1

Everything would go quiet...animals would think it had got dark (like what happens in an ecplise)

Everywhere would get pretty cold in a couple of hours Things would probably not get too bad for about 6-12 hours as there'd be a bit of residual heat locked in the oceans.

Saying that pretty much everything would freeze within 24 hours, and even those prepared -living in bunkers, with food and batteries and heating would be gone when their power and food ran out.

Answer 2

There is no light. All plant life dies out in a matter of weeks. Animals starve to death as their food source disappears. Everything freezes. The only life that would survive is the stuff that gets energy from magma vents deep beneath the ocean, but when the Earth's core cools down (which would take a very long time) those would die too.

Things like that don't happen suddenly though. We would know about it long before it happens because the sun would swell into a red giant and eventually shed all of its layers (possibly destroying the Earth in the process).

Answer 3

There is a distinct problem with this question. If something caused all fusion in the core of the sun to cease, then there would be nothing holding the sun up from its own gravity, and it would begin collapsing. This would cause the core to heat up and start the fusion process again, stabilizing itself. If somehow the core stopped fusion and by some magical force the sun didn't begin collapsing, then we wouldn't really know about it for a long time. It takes upwards of a million years for the energy generated by fusion at the core to actually reach the surface of the sun and get radiated out into the solar system.

At any rate, it's a purely academic issue. The sun can't simply "go out".

Answer 4

If the sun just "went out" light a lightbulb, we wouldn't know until 8 minutes later, as that's the amount of time it takes for light to travel from the sun to Earth.

It would start getting colder, but not instantly, as some people seem to be suggesting. An oven doesn't get instantly cold when you switch it off, and neither would the Earth. It would get very very cold, but it would take time.

Apart from the cold killing things, the lack of light would cause plants to die as they wouldn't be able to photosynthesise - andd all the things that feed on the plants would die too as there would be nothing left to eat.

Answer 5

Also over a period of several weeks the oceans would freeze, and since water expands when it turns into ice there would be enormous pressures exerted that might cause earthquakes.
The extreme cold might make rocks brittle which would in turn allow magma through from the depths, so you could get volcanic eruptions.
Nuclear power stations could continue to run for months if they could figure out a way to use some of the produced power to heat the station itself to keep it running.
Also I might stop using Yahoo answers if it all got too bad.

Answer 6

Fun "what if"?

First, it would get dark. Second it would get cold in a hurry. Let's see if day to night variations hold, it would dip below 0 F at my house by "morning". Within 24 hours it would be around -100 F. By this time I'd either be playing some ferocious beer pong with my buddies, alternating with saying good bye (wink wink) to my lovely wife.

A total of 48 hour later it would be around -200 F, so we would have definitely burnt down the evil neighbor's house by now. Then by the end of day three we'd be dead. People who could get to deep underground shelters would make it until they ran out of food.

Answer 7

A little over 8 minutes later, it would get very dark and very cold on earth (no darker than it is on a night with no moon, though). It would take a few days to get really cold, as our atmosphere holds heat in pretty well. But with no new heat coming in, in a matter of weeks the entire planet would be frozen.

Answer 8

How fast does the temperature drop daily from high to low? Now start subtracting that amount every day until you reach space temp which is about 400 below 0. Assuming 50 deg per day, we'd freeze to death in about 2-4 days. The good news? our bodies would be preserved quickly, and forever.

Answer 9

I'm sorry but you are all wrong. as the sun starts to die gravity will start to go mad. the at the first stage the sun will expand and we will all frie not freeze. there are a lot of processes that take place as a sun dies too numerous to name here.basically expanding and shrinking over and over thousands of times. also the whole process will take many millions of years to complete. FIN.

Answer 10

If the sun stopped shining we wouldn't notice for 8 minutes 33 seconds later. After that it would get quiet and then we would slowly die