If you could somehow be shielded from the heat, radiation, gravity and everything else that would destroy you, is there a surface dense enough that it could support your weight?
In: Planetary Science
Walking on the sun is like trying to stand on a giant ball of hot gas. Even if you were protected from the extreme heat and radiation, the sun doesn’t have a solid surface like Earth. Also, the sun’s gravity would pull you in, making it impossible to walk like you do on the ground. So, even with protection there’s no surface to walk on and you’d just float around due to the sun’s gravity.
The photosphere of the sun (the layer of the sun that we see as the ‘surface’) looks solid because that’s where photons can escape from. But it’s actually not just one solid layer – the layer at which the sun’s plasma is thin enough that photons can escape is several hundred kilometers deep. So while it looks like one surface, some of that light is actually coming from much deeper. Also, the plasma is much less dense than the Earth’s atmosphere, so no, you can’t walk on the surface of the sun.
But is there a layer that you could walk on? Well, no – the sun is plasma all the way down. But you might be able to swim in it. The sun’s core is more dense than you are, so there’s some point between the photosphere and the core that you would have neutral bouyancy and start to float. I mean, assuming you’re impervious to all the things that would kill you inside the sun. Also, you won’t see anything because you’ll be swimming in extremely dense high-energy plasma that will basically just look like, well, pressing your eyes to the surface of the sun, so pack sunglasses
There would be a point where the density of your flesh = density of the plasma and at that point you could ‘walk’ on the sun. Though this is the same for Jupiter, Saturn, and so on.
Once you get shielded from gravity, I”m not sure the density of the surface matters anymore.
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