189
what would happen if a rogue, earth-size planet ran straight into the sun? anything interesting?
(moist.catsweat.com)
At what speed?
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
189 points (99.5% liked)
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it would be absolutely immensely catastrophic from the point of view of the planet ... but for us and for the Sun, it would be nothing.
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Are you planning something?
don’t open this if you don’t want part of the three body problem series spoiled
Isn’t that the core element of one of the scorched earth fallback plans one of the wallfacers came up with? I thought it was supposed to have been roughly scientifically viable…? Or am I completely misremembering?
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For a start, the planet wouldn't actually collide with the sun on one piece - once the planet crosses the Roche limit it will break apart
if it "ran straight", it wouldn't have tangential speed, only radial.
All of the mass would still hit the sun, though.
Yeah, but single large mass hitting in one place vs stuff spread out vs planet forming a ring and deorbiting over months/years would affect the outcome
Practically, I'd think there wouldn't be a huge effect beyond some CMEs - the mass of the earth is a rounding error compared to the sun - but I'm not a cosmologist
CME = coronal mass ejection
I tend to agree, but I also am not a cosmologist.
I agree, and I once dated a cosmetologist.
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Would its impact create a solar flare? And if that flare was hurtling towards Earth, would it be more devastating than other solar storms we normally see?
I mean the sun is pretty heckin huge
It would a situation of, "who threw that pebble?"
You can't fool me with that label of "diameter", I know that's actually a trench with an exhaust port that if successfully fired into will cause a cascading failure
Ah, but at what speed?
Now I'm imagining the type of event that could cause a planet to move at such a significant percent of c that you could disrupt the sun with it. I don't think we're gonna get a planet moving that fast. I think we'd be limited to stellar core remnants to get that kick in velocity.
That's not how relativity works. Moving quickly relative to what? The planet might be moving slow relative to the local objects where it began its movement, but the local objects at it's origination point were also moving at some speed, and the group of objects that the local group was in were also moving at some speed, etc etc. And likewise our sun isn't stationary, it's also moving relative to everything else, so you could just as easily say the planet is stationary but our sun was moving very quickly toward the stationary planet. There is no thing as an absolute slow/fast when you're talking about bodies in space. There are tons of ways that a planet sized object could have a fraction-of-c speed relative to our sun.
And there are "rogue planets" out there. They aren't held into any orbital system, they're just flying free in empty space. So that part is true as well. It would be very unlikely that some of them AREN'T moving extremely quickly relative to the sun.
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I would expect that the planets gravity while heading into the sun from outside the solar system would greatly disturb the existing planets and probably throw some of them into new orbits if not out of the solar system entirely.
New fear unlocked.
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Big flare, seismic waves propagating on the surface, and POOF.
