While browsing V-Sauce on youtube last night, I found a very intriguing hypothetical question, “What if the Sun Disappeared”? What would happen? Would the human race perish, would the Earth be able to sustain life? I found myself dying to know the answer (though a highly improbable one) because there has been a lot of speculation about the future of life on this planet.
Again, it is HIGHLY improbable that such a thing could occur. After all, there is more of a chance of the Earth being engulfed by the sun as opposed to it disappearing but if it WERE to happen, here’s how it would go down…
First of all, the time that it takes light from the sun to travel to the Earth is precisely 8 minutes and 20 seconds. In other words, at the exact moment that the sun disappeared, we wouldn’t even know it. Because it is SO FAR AWAY, it would still appear to be in the sky for those 8+ minutes. Once we did realize this though, dually we’d lose the gravitational pull that the sun propagates. The sun’s gravitational influence causes the Earth to travel around its mass. If it were to disappear, in those 8 minutes and 20 seconds, we’d be shot off track into the blackness of the universe, in a line tangent to where we were left spinning.
We would not suffer a total absence of light, however. We would still receive a little bit of light from the universe…precisely 1/300 of that of the moon and we’d still see our neighboring planets reflecting light for about 30 minutes. It would simply appear to be ALWAYS nighttime, which is depressing…but not a death sentence.
Shortly after, the Earth would begin to get REALLY cold. Initially, the process of cooling would happen VERY suddenly, then it would slow down over time, dropping to an average temperature of about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. As humans, though, because this would take a while, we would adapt, although having to move to areas where geo-thermal heat is in abundance. It would be cold enough, though, to actually see condensation occurring within the air. The air would actually turn to water! However the earth has SO MUCH AIR…that it would take THOUSANDS of years to run out of it completely, even with a lack of photosynthesis from plants (they would probably die pretty rapidly) and an excess of carbon dioxide.
So there…the human race would not perish. We would simply have to acclimate to colder conditions…not so bad, right?
Also, I’ve been a physics student for 6 years now and I had no idea about the titulus-sprinkle molecule Seamus mentioned. Fascinating!
Hey, physics grad student here. You guys are mostly right, but one key concept is being forgotten here. While it’s true that you can use the Lane–Emden equation for the sun’s gravitation, you forgot that the result must be a _dimensionless_ radius, so it’s not representative of any physical state in the real world.
Also, back to the probabilistic interpretation of Schrodinger’s equation applied to the sun, measurements have confirmed that the sun actually has a form of entangled ‘teleportation’ (referring to the Einstein-Rosen bridge that Sir Jackson mentioned earlier).
The most controversial topic of the Probabilistic Solar Theory is that one must throw away most of the Standard Model being used today to confirm the mathematics of it all. It’s great to see this kind of discussion being held on a PSU site!
Here are some resources for further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation
http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/q/quantum_entanglement.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-Griffiths/dp/0131244051/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1366691244&sr=8-7&keywords=quantum+textbook
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v108/i4/p1070_1
http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v36/i8/p2250_1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermitian_matrix
Yep, and if you consider space a Newtonian self-gravitating, spherically symmetric, polytropic fluid you can use the Lane–Emden equation to calculate the new gravitational potential of the sun while its everywhere. Science indeed!
Oh shoot, you’re actually right. I forgot about how the effects of quantum-entanglement will make the Sun simultaneously everywhere. I suppose this means that at some random time, it will meet the Schwarzschild radius criteria and actually disappear from our solar system. Science!
Yes but if you couple Einstein-Rosen Bridge mechanics with the multi-verse theory our sun is actually be transported everywhere at the same time while in the bridge. This is a weird facet of quantum-physics how something can be everywhere at the same time, but scientists use quantum-entanglement to explain this You can track the movement of a star though a bridge through the emission of titulus-sprinkle molecules in ambient space. Its actually quite interesting to think about when you consider the effect of inverse Compton scatter on the active galactic nuclei.
Yeah, but I’m sure stellar interactions would break the bridge before it could make it through, and as you probably know, matter cannot exist between two points of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. I mean, that’s all assuming the Bouncing Baby Universe Theory is true.
http://science.nasa.gov/topics/astrophysics/universe/
Well Jackson, the mass will be quantum-transasporated through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge and sent to a neighboring galaxy where it will most likely become a black hole.
A real question would be if the sun were to disappear, where would all its mass go? But yeah, I think life after the destruction of the sun would be pretty awful. Plant life and animal life would die, and we’d be left… eating chemical foods. Pretty crazy to think about.