What If the Sun Moved One Kilometer Closer Every Second?

One kilometer per second sounds slow. At that speed, the Sun needs 4 years, 8 months and 23 days to reach us. This video follows one ordinary street from a cool afternoon to the moment the Sun's surface touches the ground. THE FACTS • The Sun is about 150 million km away. Closing in at 1 km/s (3,600 km/h), it reaches Earth after 4 years, 8 months and 23 days. • Sunlight takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach us today. At the end, it takes about 2 seconds. • At the distance of Venus (108 million km), sunlight is about twice as strong. At the distance of Mercury (58 million km), it is almost 7 times as strong. • In December 2024, Parker Solar Probe passed 6.9 million km from the Sun's center, closer than any spacecraft before. • The Sun is 109 times as wide as Earth. When its surface reaches us, sunlight is about 46,000 times as strong as today. • Rock melts at around 1,200 °C, iron at 1,538 °C, tungsten at 3,422 °C. The Sun's visible surface is about 5,500 °C. SOME OF IT IS NOT REAL • The Sun cannot move like this. Gravity, Earth's orbit, the Moon and the tides are left out. • The temperature counter is a simple model: bare, dark ground without air or oceans, averaged over day and night. The real Earth would react differently, and its oceans would boil first. • The Sun stays at one spot in the sky so you can watch it grow. • The distance counter measures to the center of the Sun. • In the shots from space, the Sun and Earth are drawn larger than scale where they would otherwise be too small to see. • The street, the town and its people are invented. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:11 One kilometer every second 0:43 The heat builds 1:23 Water boils away 2:05 The street catches fire 3:28 Metal glows 5:01 Rock melts 6:21 Rock boils 7:28 The Sun fills the sky Animated in 3D and rendered frame by frame. All music and sound effects were made for this video. #WhatIf #Sun #Space