In a sane world this would earn you a dunce hat. In this one it will earn you a position in the gubmint.
i mean, if the moon is up there, the light first has to bounce off of the moon, and then back to earth, so yes, it would most definitely take longer…
That’s boring.
Can we just have the reverse, like a “When Day Breaks” scenario? At least its fun.
But not by much longer. People on the other side of the world or connected to satellites monitoring sunspots would notice pretty much immediately after the light ceases to reach the earth and would tell everyone else over the internet
No dude, it’s only a difference of 1.3 seconds, faster then the Internet unfortunately.
And even if you’re not connected at the moment, the moon will go dark.
yeah but everybody else would be sleeping so it would still take longer
The real question is if the earth becomes a rogue planet or if Jupiter captures most/all of the remaining solar system. Jupiter is technically a failed star, so could it finally get it’s glowup from being the sun’s understudy and keep us all together until we fall into the gravitational well of a new star?
If the sun just disappears, I doubt even having another sun would keep everything from flying off to fuck knows where. Jupiter, by comparison, is beyond hope. The Barycenter is far from Jupiter.
And now for the segue into a shower thought - so the first thing night side would notice is the Moon disappearing (if it’s in the night sky), but after that, how long before effects begin to suggest something is seriously wrong on the day side. Something tells me it will be sooner than the morning.
I wonder how long till everyone was dead. And what would be the last living species.
My guess is that bacteria down in the crust near thermal vents would live the longest. Thousnands of years if they are able to follow the heat down.
Figure bunkered people might make it a few months depending on their power source and ability to withstand dropping pressure. Not sure how long it would take for the atmosphere to freeze. Government bunker that is vacuum proof with a reactor might make it a decade.
I’d assume after 8 minutes the people on the day side would notice and all media would blow up, so hopefully you’d be asleep and wouldn’t have to worry :)
worry
I, for one, welcome the inexplicable annihilation of the sun
Yeah! Fuck you, Ra! I got sunburned on Lake Powell!
But all the solar panels will stop working so there will be no electricity. Batteries would run out and any other source of energy would be destroyed by people who started a cult worshipping the Sun hoping it would reappear
So no social media on the part of the Earth that would notice the disappearance of the sun. The other side wouldnt have any problems with electricity since they wouldnt have the Sun-worshipping cult
The ocean would revolt.
Cool writing prompt: Elusive Dawn
Wouldn’t the planet rapidly start to cool? I think we’d be dead by morning
The core is still hot. If we bury ourselves deep underground, there is a chance the humanity could survive for thousands of years without a sun. If not humanity, then some sort of life will survive long enough for future archeologists to find it millions of years later.
But don’t quite me on this; I’m simply reciting from memory something I read in National Geographic or a similar publication 10-20 years ago. IDK how true this actually is.
If we bury ourselves deep
Yeah, something will live, but I was more thinking surface life.
Atmosphere would hold the heat for a bit, the real issues will begin with food shortages because the crops won’t grow
Yeah but how long is a bit? Also, without the gravity center of our solar system, how long would it take for all the planets to start drifting off into the void?
A bit - probably weeks to months. For the second question - 8 minutes for the Earth, since gravity propagates at the speed of light
Expanding a little on the last part, Earth’s orbital velocity is about 29.8 km/s so that’s the speed at which we would suddenly be leaving the former location of the solar system in a direction that depends on what time of year it happened. Regardless of direction though, the escape velocity of the Milky Way around where we are is about 544 km/s so there’s no way we’d be leaving the galaxy. On the other hand the plane of the galaxy is only about 6 degrees off from the galactic center at the moment, so if this happened at the right time of year (don’t know when that is) we could launch somewhat towards the core. We would not however get very close to it because the sun’s own orbital velocity is about 230 km/s so we’d still be in close to the same galactic orbit overall, just potentially a bit more eccentric.
Do you think Jupiter would take over as our center of the solar system? Hopefully it doesn’t sling us into deep space or another planet
Doesn’t the earth itself provide a significant amount of heat from the core? I’m sure I read somewhere that for something like every 10 meters down you dig, the temperature raises by 1° celcius. So maybe we’d not notice a temperature drop so quickly?
The surface would eventually freeze over. But some life would almost definitely survive deep underground and underwater, near geothermal vents not unlike those that hosted the first lifeforms on Earth. And, maybe, in some billions or trillions of years, Earth would stray near another star system, get captured by its gravity and slowly thaw out, restarting the evolution of life.
Would hydrothermal vents produce enough heat? Or would the oceans freeze over? And then would there just be thermal bubbles surrounding the vents in oceanic ice?
Even if they were to, there is still the deep biosphere
The oceans would eventually freeze over, but the deep ocean could stay liquid for tens of millions of years. Ice is a pretty good insulator, and there is more than one moon in the solar system suspected to have liquid oceans under a layer of ice.
Not sure how quick exactly, but the earth doesn’t provide enough heat, not even close. Kurzgesagt has a video on a similar subject, without the
trillions1.7e17 Watts showering the earth every second we’d get awfully cold awfully quick. They are talking about slowly moving away from the sun, but they conclude it would get real icy
The moon also doesn’t emit it’s own light. It would take longer for the moon to “disappear” than it would for the sun but it wouldn’t be the whole night.
The moon is just a few light-seconds away from earth; that’s why they could have conversations with ground control during the moon landings. Moon will go dark a few seconds after the sun.
I agree with you, but also… I’m not sure that I’d notice that I could see the moon a few minutes ago and now I can’t (unless I happened to be looking at it as it happened)… I feel like that is something that could be happening every single night and I’ve never noticed.
The sun disappearing is like… Super noticeable by comparison.
You would notice the lack of light. The night isn’t pitch black xD
Maybe if I lived in the countryside, here in a city, I only really notice the moon if I’m looking for it (which I do often, I love seeing our moon).
Most cities have brighter light pollution than the moon can provide.
I wonder how long it would take before you would feel it becoming colder
If you ever experienced a solar eclipse, you will feel drastically how much the temperature changes.
Even the difference between standing in shade and standing in direct sunlight on a sunny day is noticeable.
I wonder if we would feel the sudden disappearance of the centripetal force of the sun’s gravity.
After 8 minutes
http://scienceprimer.com/lunar-and-solar-tides
Yes, the tidal effect of the sun would disappear, and that would probably make the oceans all fucky suddenly (after an 8 minutes lag).
Does gravity travel at the speed of light?
Of course. It can’t travel faster
Yes. General relativity.
The speed of light is more than just the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Not particles, not gravitational waves (waves and particles are actually kinda equivalent anyway), not any kind of “information”.
Consequently, if two events occur in a way that a particle would have to travel faster than the speed of light to travel between them, then it’s impossible for one of those events to be caused by the other. They must be unrelated. So the soonest we will see any effect of the sun blipping out of existence, whatever the medium (light/gravity/??), is after 8 minutes.
What about quantum entanglement? Is that also limited to the speed of light?
Interestingly it’s not, but the thing is that you can’t actually use quantum entanglement to send information from one particle to the other, so it does not violate the principles of special relativity.
So usually this is explained with two scientists, Alice and Bob, on far away planets. They’re each in the possession of a particle that is entangled with the other, and in a superposition of state 1 and state 2. When Alice measures the state of her particle, it collapses into one of the states, say state 1. When Bob measures the state of his particle immediately after, before any particle travelling at light speed could get there, it will also be in state 1 (assuming they were entangled in such a way that the state will be the same).
Due to special relativity, for some observers it could actually have been Bob who measured the state of his particle first, before Alice did. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. They both got the same information: “state 1”, but since they can’t control what state the particle will collapse to, no information can be exchanged between Alice and Bob.
In quantum encryption, it is that bit of shared information that Alice and Bob can use as a key to encrypt and decrypt messages, but those messages are still sent the old fashioned way, using light waves traveling at light speed.
The gravity does not travel, the gravity is.
Changes in the gravitational field definitely travel, and do so at the speed of light.
Look up LIGO
If it didn’t travel, it wouldn’t take 8 minutes to stop right?
If the mass vanishes, then the gravity would also vanish, at the same time.
But vanishing is magic, it goes against the laws of physics, so you could apply any fictional logic
After 8 minutes, almost certainly
Gravity isn’t a force, strictly speaking. Objects move along geodesics in spacetime (that’s basically a straight line along a curved surface), and gravity bends spacetime, and therefore also these geodesics, around massive objects. So you don’t actually get accelerated by gravity, that’s why you don’t feel anything during free fall. What we perceive as the force of gravity pushing us down, is the solid ground accelerating us upwards, when following the geodesic would have us fall instead.
So when the sun disappears, the geodesic that used to spiral around the sun suddenly straightens out, and the neutral movement, the new free fall, has the earth continuing in a straight line. You wouldn’t be able to feel that. What the other person said about tidal forces is true tho, it would likely cause worldwide tsunamis
If it happens at night it will probably take 5 or 6 seconds longer for people to start seeing the first messages on the internet
The telephone: “Am I a joke to you?”
Who would leave their sound on in the middle of the night?
For further reading, see Galaxias by Stephen Baxter.
