It all started when my little sister asked, “How hot is the sun?” Then the conversation went into, “Why can you die of heat? Isn’t it just a bunch of molecular jiggling?”

Qs:

Then finally, the first question about actual fire came. It was, “Will your body actually burn when exposed to the sun?” This might feel or actually be obvious, but my thought process was that once all of the oxygen was used up, it would stop and you would just fall into the sun.

The next question I had after thinking about oxygen(from the body) and the sun was, “What if oxygen falls into the sun?”

After thinking through that, I had another question. The question was a pretty bad one, since I forgot about something obvious. The question was, “Why does hydrogen and oxygen alone burn?” (yeah.)

And then just now, “How many elements can be incorporated into fuel of some sort?” (clarification: the fuel has to burn. Uranium would not be a ‘fuel’.) (Also, I decided to incorporate the ‘oxygen’ part of fire as part of the ‘yes’ section.)

As:

To 1st question:

So I searched up the chemical makeups of a bunch of sugars, fats, and proteins, but it seems like there is about the same hydrogen and oxygen in those molecules. When I looked up the body’s elemental makeup, though, the oxygen was way more than everything else at 65%! It turns out that that was the mass of the atoms combined and not the actual count, so I searched up the count. It turned out that hydrogen was more abundant. Then I searched up the amount of oxygen in blood, which did not provide any usable results. My guess now is that something will catch on fire in the body, quickly be snuffed out, and fall into the sun (the fall might occur before the flame could get snuffed out).

To 2nd question:

My guess is that water would form(if it still could, under the heat of the sun) as a result of fire produced by hydrogen(from the sun) and oxygen. Then the water would break down due to the heat of the sun. Quickly searching it up revealed that half of the water would decompose at temperatures of 3000 ˚C and that the surface of the sun is about 6000 ˚C. This means that the water would decompose into oxygen and hydrogen, restarting the process(maybe).

To 3rd question:

Easy. Hydrogen is the fuel, oxygen is the oxygen, and the heat is the heat.

To 4th question:

Okay. This is probably not answerable, but we can try. I’m going to assume that anything with a half-life with less than an hour is probably not a reasonable price to get or experiment. This brings down the possible elements to less or equal to 102. There are also 7 noble gases, but one of them is oganesson, which we already counted. This brings us down to less or equal to 96.

We can also find a lower bound by finding the possible elements that can be used as fuel. All of the transition metals can probably bond somehow to form a fuel.

Now for different groups.

group 1: alkaline metals

All fuel. Pretty much hydrogen, but more reactive as you go to the heavier elements.

group 2: alkaline earth metals

Also fuel. Worse fuel than the alkaline metals, but still fuel.

group 3 - 12: transition metals

Probably all able to somehow bond with other elements and compounds to produce some kind of fuel.

group 13: “the boron family”

Boron can make flammable organic compounds, so I’m guessing that all of the elements below it also in group 13 can replace boron in the compound.

group 14: “the carbon family”

Same as group 13 since carbon is literally the backbone of organic and flammable compounds.

group 15: pnictogens

probably the same as group 13 and 14.

group 16: chalcogens

definitely. The name of the group is literally “the oxygen family”.

group 17: halogens

Apparently the lightest 3 halogens burn easily. The other heavier halogens can probably burn under extreme heat, though.

(below is from group 1 to group 17, but non-radioactive elements only)

6 + 5 + 29 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 65, but there is one “acceptable” radioactive transition metal and one “acceptable” radioactive alkaline earth metal, which bumps it up to 67.

We can assume that there are between 67 and 96 elements that can be incorporated into fuel. (actually probably not, since I missed the actinides and lanthanides and because some noble gasses can actually compound. Also, I didn’t want to search up 96 different elements, so I based them off of their groups. probably not a good idea.)

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( )( )___) (thats a fire.)