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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'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 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
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
Most of us sleep at night and don't check our info-hose feeds until we wake up.
Only if you believe in magic box or “radio”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wherever you live on the Earth's surface starts cooling every night and gets warmed up again the next day. It wouldn't cool any faster if the sun went away, it would just keep cooling at the normal rate until everything was frozen. But I doubt it would take more than a week or two, depending on where you live.
Teacher: I meant the global we. So it would average out to 8 minutes.
In a sane world this would earn you a dunce hat. In this one it will earn you a position in the gubmint.
What about gravity? I know I read something about this once, but is gravity also limited to the speed of light?
Yeah, we'll feel it after 8 minutes all right :-)
Gravity travels at the speed of light.
Does it? In my experience alcohol can delay gravity
From what I know, particles that have a mass greater than 0 move below the speed of light and can never reach it. Particles that have no mass (every force is transferred via particles) move at the speed of light. So there is no way to have anything that is faster than the speed of light, not even forces.
Yep, it is. We'd stay in our orbit of the sun for 8 minutes after it vanished too
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...
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).
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
I wonder how long it would take before you would feel it becoming colder