Comment on what would happen if a rogue, earth-size planet ran straight into the sun? anything interesting?
cevn@lemmy.world 3 months agoFascinating. 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??
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
peopleproblems@lemmy.world 3 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.
cevn@lemmy.world 3 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.
peopleproblems@lemmy.world 3 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.