Comment

Comment on what would happen if a rogue, earth-size planet ran straight into the sun? anything interesting?

Oooo, good question. What if it were traveling, relatively, at a fair percentage of C? Say 80 or 90%? What if it went not straight through the center, but say 30% off of center? Would any mass make a complete pass through, at that velocity? It’d be about 23% more dense from relativity, but countless YouTube videos about gun ammunition has taught me that velocity is the biggest factor in armor penetration. Would it blow a huge plume of plasma out there other side?

Dude, you just made this no doubt question far, far more interesting!

source

Sort:hotnew top

cevn@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fascinating. Lets say at 90% the planet spends 1 second inside the sun. Doesn’t seem like enough to melt the whole thing so it just keeps going, just a lot smaller. The core of the sun tried its best to push it back but gets pierced and the fusion reaction stops. Star killer??

source
- peopleproblems@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  No. You are also forgetting the density of the sun increases with depth. For instance, if it’s heading for the core - the solar core is about 155g/cm^3. Where as earth is 5.5g/cm3.
  
  Essentially, going 0.9C is going to impact the sun, and we can say the incoming earth object is going to classically hit with 4.9*10^24 J.
  
  At this size and and energy, we compare it to the rest energy of the entire sun (this isn’t how we would actually do it) but the sun has a total resting mass energy equivalence of like 1.8x10^41 J.
  
  The energy of the earth like object impacting the sun is 0.000000000000000027%.
  
  The sun effectively doesn’t even know it happened.
  
  source
  - cevn@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I knew my crap science would get the real scientists in the comments, good point about the density. It would just sort of harmlessly splat.
    
    source
    peopleproblems@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Now hold on, I did my math wrong. It was far too late at night. I used C=300000 not 3*10^8.
    
    That gives us an impact energy, classically, of 5.37*10^41 J.
    
    So that is about 3 times the kinetic energy than the engery at rest of Sol.
    
    Sol is not at rest, further, we have non- insignificant factors at play here.
    
    Sol is orbiting Sagittarius A* at 250km/s. Additionally, we have the general relativistic relationship between Sol and our massive projectile.
    
    I’m going to work on modeling this, it got far more interesting.
    
    source
- peopleproblems@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Another comparison here. If a human was just made of ballistics gel, weight for weight, meaning no vital organs or anything, a 10g round would hit a target it 1/9000 the side of.
  
  Earth, hitting the sun would be like something 1/800000 this size of.
  
  Oh shit my lunesta kicked in. Someone better double check my numbers
  
  source
netvor@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Dude, you just made this no doubt question far, far more interesting!

…and what if it was running AWAY from the sun!

Here, Fixed it for ya.

source
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Oooo, good question. What if it were traveling, relatively, at a fair percentage of C? Say 80 or 90%?

How many objects (not counting the “Heart of Gold”) do you know that are traveling at such speeds?

source