or just a ‘poof’?
All the people on that planet would die.
Are you planning something?
The planet would have burned to a crisp a long time before it even touched the sun. A waft of residual gases would maybe get close enough, which does exactly nothing.
It’s the equivalent of tossing a single grain of hail into an active volcano.
I could see that if a planet slowly spiraled into it, but the question specifically asks about a direct collision.
Do you really think silicon and iron and other relatively heavy elements can simply be vaporized that quickly?
Uh, yes. Absolutely. The corona of the sun alone is about 5 million km thick and has temperatures of >1 million degrees C.
Crossing that distance takes about 0.3 light minutes. For a planet with a somewhat large mass traveling at a fraction of that (average travel speed of celestial objects is around 1000-10000 km/min, depending on its mass), it would take between 83 and 833 hours (3.5-35 days).
For reference, the distance from earth to moon is about 400000km (and takes a rocket 3 days to traverse), so the sun’s radius is about 12x that. Just put things into perspective.
Silicon vaporizes at 3650°C, iron at 3500°C. A couple days at a million degrees? Yeah it’s vaporized alright.
At what speed?
Oooo, good question. What if it were traveling, relatively, at a fair percentage of C? Say 80 or 90%? What if it went not straight through the center, but say 30% off of center? Would any mass make a complete pass through, at that velocity? It’d be about 23% more dense from relativity, but countless YouTube videos about gun ammunition has taught me that velocity is the biggest factor in armor penetration. Would it blow a huge plume of plasma out the other side?
Dude, you just made this no doubt question far, far more interesting!
Oooo, good question. What if it were traveling, relatively, at a fair percentage of C? Say 80 or 90%?
How many objects (not counting the “Heart of Gold”) do you know that are traveling at such speeds?
I mean the sun is pretty heckin huge
It would a situation of, “who threw that pebble?”
Ah, but at what speed?
The speed of love.
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.
Big flare, seismic waves propagating on the surface, and POOF.
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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.
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