Everyone like to joke about this manhole cover flying around in space, but if you do the math on the aerodynamic heating you get a temperature higher than the boiling point of iron.
Nuclear launch detected....
Submitted 3 months ago by Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net to [deleted]
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/67eaab6b-980d-4671-bbe3-27df67025431.png
Comments
rbesfe@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
phdepressed@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
What is irons vaporization temp? And wouldn’t space cool it down(and keep it somewhat together barring other gravitational objects affecting it.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
Iron goes molten at 2,800f. The air friction would have caused that long before getting to space. As for staying together and resolidifying in space…well imagine how well maple syrup would stay held together if you threw it out of a cup pretty hard. The iron would have went molten and just proceeded to “spatter” and not have any piece left heavy enough to keep up an escape velocity.
erev@lemmy.world 3 months ago
space might not cool it down because the only real way for it to lose the heat would be blackbody radiation. by now it’s probably cooled off but without any atmosphere or other materials to cool it off, it probably stayed hot for a while
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
But also at that speed it’d only be in the atmosphere for a couple seconds; even at that high temp it may not have been able to transfer all that energy into the manhole cover. The energy may have just gone into ablating away the surface.
But it probably ablated away the whole mass of the manhole cover.
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I love the juxtaposition of these:
This idea is so incredibly stupid that science needs to study precisely how much it won’t work.
IDew@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Woaw. Just wow.
Very interesting article, thanks for quoting it lol
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 3 months ago
For reference, earths escape velocity at the surface is about 11 km/s. I’m not sure how quickly the cap would slow down, but if it hadn’t been vaporised it surely would be orbiting the sun right now.
Also, the escape velocity from the Sun at Earths distance would be 16.6 km/s on top of earths speed, so depending on the direction it could’ve escaped the suns orbit as well.
But it was most likely vaporised
PunnyName@lemmy.world 3 months ago
This is A+ solid gold writing for a perfect “fuck you” to Gary.