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dc - Is Superman incapable of averting the catastrophe of an earlier-than-expected nova?



Our sun will someday (in billions of years) go nova, expanding in size and changing color. Anyone nearby is sure to have a bad day. Should this event occur earlier than predicted, however, would Superman be able to intervene? The very condition his powers rely on would also be one of the qualities that would change.


I do not ask what specific actions he might take if his powers were to remain, but rather (assuming any of them would be relevant) would he have them to use at all?




Answer



The Short Answer:


No, Superman from most of the DC Universe continuities readers are familiar with would have no chance to effectively stop a star the size of our sun from going nova. Despite his amazing powers, it is not a matter of power, it is a matter of scale that would defeat Superman in such a titanic struggle to control one of the most powerful forces in nature, the death of a star.


The Explanation


Superman derives his powers in an as yet undisclosed manner from the G-type star our planet currently resides around. Since the mechanic for how his power functions has never been clearly defined let’s set this up as a purely physical challenge.




  • The sun is about to go nova, increasing its energy output exponentially and will engulf the Earth in a matter of months. Can Superman’s powers give him any means of stopping it?





  • To hazard a guess, I would say no. Yes, Superman’s powers are prodigious allowing him the capabilities to do many things only capable with an advanced technology. But even his most amazing abilities would mean nothing in comparison to the object from which he derives his powers. Our sun is a massive energy source, even a mere solar flare, a star’s least expression of its incredible output possess the power of a 160 billion megatons of TNT in one moment; sufficient enough to give even a Superman pause.





A solar flare is a sudden brightening observed over the Sun's surface or the solar limb, which is interpreted as a large energy release of up to 6 × 10^25 joules of energy (about a sixth of the total energy output of the Sun each second or 160,000,000,000 megatons of TNT equivalent, over 25,000 times more energy than released from the impact of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter). Wikipedia - Solar Flare





  • Superman’s abilities are a function of the energy of the sun being catalyzed though his Kryptonian physiology. So unless his physiology allows him to create an energy output greater than his input (which theoretically he already does) this is not a problem he can tackle. It is a matter of scale.





  • Assuming he could reach the speed of light, circling the Earth one time at light speed takes him 0.133 seconds. Circling the sun at light speed would take him 14.5 seconds. At our scale he would be extraordinary, at the scale of our sun, he would be just too slow, too small, take too long to do anything. It’s not a slight against him or his powers, it’s just showing size does matter when you leave the planetary scale.




  • His powers while they are capable of doing things on a planetary scale which would be considered mindboggling, at a solar scale, he is too small to do anything effective enough to stop a star from going nova; simply because the size of the sun, the area it covers, the energy output would simply be far greater than even his organic form, adapted for the processing and conversion of solar energy into super-energetic feats could handle.




  • Think of Superman in this instance acting more like a fuse than a battery. He would absorb all the energy he could store and even if he could release that energy, just as fast as he could absorb it, he would eventually begin to feel stresses which should eventually overwhelm both his invulnerability and his ability to process, or manipulate energy and begin to tear him apart.





  • This would be the modern Superman as we know him. We have seen potential futures where Superman Prime becomes so invulnerable he eventually elects to live in the sun itself using his powers in a feedback loop to prevent him from being destroyed by the sun. But Superman Prime is also thousands of years older and evidently an order of magnitude more powerful than any iteration of Superman ever known.




Superman Prime from DC One Million #4


The alternative timeline Superman Prime; a being so powerful he was capable of living inside the sun and beaming his extra converted solar power to his super-powered descendants.


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