• Question: how many light bulbs would you need to be as bright as the sun

    Asked by m and m 2004 to Dervil, Moises, Pramod, Saoirse, Stephen on 4 Nov 2016. This question was also asked by Sinéad.
    • Photo: Moises Jezzini

      Moises Jezzini answered on 4 Nov 2016:

      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 100Watts 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.

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