because even the Sun can’t pay the energy bill to escape the Milky Way.
It's hold in it's place because of the gravitational field of some even bigger star.
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The concept is simple but brutal. You want out? You better be fast enough. Escape velocity is the speed required to break out of a gravitational well and it’s not optional.
- For Earth to escape the Sun it requires around 42 km/s.
- For Sun to escape the Milky Way it needs around 537 km/s (depends on exact position)
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Again it's not that simple because the more massive the object you're trying to escape from, the deeper the well, and the more energy it takes.
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Let’s say you want to knock Earth out of orbit. You’d need to give it a speed boost of 12 km/s to escape Earth's gravity.
To get it out of the Sun’s orbit at least around 42 km/s is needed.
That’s a lot, but now look at Jupiter which is 318 times the Earth’s mass. You wanna knock it off its orbit you’ll need so much energy you’ll blow up your calculator.
Now apply this to the Sun and you’re talking about lifting 1.989 × 10³⁰ kg of mass out of a galactic orbit that’s been spinning for 4.6 billion years.
The energy required isn’t even insane but actually transcendental.
You would need a force greater than anything we’ve seen in the known universe like short of galactic collisions, supernova clusters, or the wrath of a rogue black hole on a bender.
Just like a rocket needs more fuel to carry more weight, breaking gravitational bonds gets exponentially harder with mass.
Like example, to knock Mercury out of orbit, It's possible with god-tier nukes.
To knock Earth out more energy is needed.
For Jupiter we need galactic-level tech.
And the Sun itself we'd need to rewrite physics, or harness energy at Type III civilization levels. (On the Kardashev scale, we haven’t even hit 0.8.)
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Sun is not a prisoner because it's weak.
It's a prisoner because gravity doesn’t care about power, it cares about proximity and mass.
And just like you can’t flinch a mountain with your bare hands, you can’t knock a star off its galactic path without rewriting the entire dance of creation.
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And the funny part is we don’t even know what gravity is 😁😂. We don’t even know how this jail works.
- Is it a curve in spacetime?
- A field?
- A hypothetical graviton particle?
- A leak from extra dimensions?
We observe gravity. We measure its effects.
But we still don’t understand what causes it at the fundamental level.
These rules are still an unsolved riddle wrapped in tensor equations and unsatisfied physicists.
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Till then Sun is just another inmate in a multilevel cosmic prison.
It burns. It rages. It illuminates life.
But it’s stuck.
Not by choice, not by failure but by the same rule i.e. the rule of gravity that traps galaxies, black holes, and photons.
Freedom, in this universe, has a price.
And the Sun can’t afford it either.