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

or just a ‘poof’?

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Edit: I was off by a big order of magnitude, see my reply to this comments reply.

    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
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      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
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        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.