or just a ‘poof’?
Big flare, seismic waves propagating on the surface, and POOF.
A “planet” traveling at the speed of light would need to be composed entirely of photons, and (assuming an Earth-sized relativistic mass) would have 5.37x10^41 J of energy. That’s around 2.3x the gravitational binding energy of the Sun, so I assume it would be obliterated, along with all of its planets.
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.
Are you sure about that? If there are things I know about the solar system, it’s that the distance between planets is massive and earth weighs nothing compared to the outer planets or the sun.
That earth like rogue planet needs to be like 1/500th of the distance to the sun to have an comparable gravitational pull (sun is 333000 heavier, sqrt is 577), and I’m not a astronomer but I believe for each planet a random number between 0 and 2 solar distances that the rogue planet passes the orbit is appropriate. So like, 1/1000 chance a planet gets seriously disturbed…
I’m gonna be honest I thought this would be way lower before I calculated.
I mean the sun is pretty heckin huge
It would a situation of, “who threw that pebble?”
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.
We are going to collide with the Andromeda galaxy maybe 1 billion years before the sun fizzles out. Something there with opposite galactic orbit from us could smack into our sun at over 700 km/s.
Okay so I forgot how big the sun is and had that absentminded mental picture moment of “oh it would make a big bang as something 3/4s the size of the sun would hit it”…
This picture was a very helpful reminder of just how out to lunch that thought was. Don’t trust your absent thoughts, folks 😅
The more I learn about the sun, the more I realize those ancient civilizations who worshipped it got it right. Look at that thing it’s fucking huge, scary, and it’s like right there.
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?
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
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
Sorry, but that’s wrong.
Roche limit applies in a circular orbit, tidal effects are irrelevant in a head on collision.
Famous example of a comet breaking up from entering Jupiter’s roche limit in a highly eccentric orbit (not circular). Spaghettification is also an example of how tidal forces still apply during a head on collision.