Article if you’d rather read about it.
A common joke is “just launch X into the sun and be done with it”. Turns out, that’s actually a really difficult thing to do.
From Earth, we would have to accelerate a spacecraft to 33 m/s in the opposite direction of our orbit in order to get it to fall into the sun (without entering an elliptical orbit) For reference, we only need to launch a spacecraft at 11 km/s in the same direction of our orbit to cause the spacecraft to escape our solar system.
This means that it would take less energy to launch a spacecraft to another star than our own sun.
Or you just let it be elliptical for a while and that shit will burn up before very long.
You don’t need to hit the center of the sun to be incinerated by it.
You occasionally hear of houses being hit by fragments of deorbited space stations or things like that. I’m wondering how much of our trash would survive a shallow reentry.
And also how bad spreading its aerosolized forms across hundreds of miles would be in the long run.