On BBC Radio 4, Drs Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry have been answering intriguing scientific questions from listeners and the BBC Future audience.

One vexing query the pair have been exploring rocketed in from Elisabeth Hill, via BBC Future’s Facebook page, who asked: “Could we shoot garbage into the Sun?”

Fair question. After all, if we can detect gravitational waves, or send a probe to land on a comet, surely we can send some rubbish to our nearest star?

Though as Rutherford and Fry discovered in the radio episode below, it’s not so simple:

The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry: The Stellar Dustbin