What's next if our sun disappears suddenly?

What would happen if the sun disappeared this very moment?

This article was inspired from Vsauce Video by Michael Stevens in Youtube. He asks many intriguing questions that we never give a thought. One of his question was what is our sun disappears suddenly.

The sun is about 333,000 times the mass of Earth and produces the same amount of energy as 100 billion hydrogen bombs every second. It is the centre of all processes of life on earth because plants fix carbon through process called photosynthesis which requires sun and heterotrophs live on plants to get their share of carbon. Its giant mass makes the sun the dominant gravitational force in the solar system that locks all eight planets into elliptical orbits.

At the same time, the sun’s enormous energy heats our planet just enough so that Earth’s surface is the right temperature for liquid water — the catalyst for life.

But what would happen if we lost the sun?

What might seem like a silly question on the surface was actually an important thought experiment for Albert Einstein.

Their is a speed for gravity!

Before Einstein attacked this problem, scientists suspected — but hadn't proved — that gravity acted instantaneously. 

If that were true, then the first thing that would happen when the sun disappeared is that Earth, along with all the other planets, would go flying off into space. It would be complete and utter chaos in our solar system.

Light, on the other hand, is not instantaneous: It travels at approximately 1080 million kilometres per hour and takes roughly 8 minutes to reach Earth. Therefore, we would still see the sun in our sky eight minutes after it was gone.

So, if the speed of light is a constant and the speed of gravity is instantaneous, then we would feel the sun’s disappearance before we saw it.

But, as Einstein showed in in his theory of general relativity that he introduced in 1915, the force from gravity is not instantaneous. In fact, it travels the same speed as light.

Therefore, if the sun disappeared, we would remain blissfully unaware for eight minutes that inevitable doom was upon us.

Eternal night when the doom hits.

We wouldn't be left in complete and utter darkness, however.

The stars would still shine, and electricity would continue to work so cities would remain lit for as long as the power lasted. Even the planets would remain visible for a brief time.

For example, when Jupiter is closest to Earth it’s about 33 light minutes away, which means we would continue to see the giant planet for over an hour — the time it would take for residual sunlight to reach Jupiter and reflect back to Earth — after the sun was gone.

But after eight minutes, one thing on Earth would come to a screeching halt, explains Michael Stevens, who founded and stars in the widely popular YouTube channel Vsauce.

Without sunlight, photosynthesis will not happen because plant cannot generate food without light.

Most small plants would die within a matter of days,but the bigger plants will live a year or more depending on their stored food, but that’s not what we should be worried about: Earth’s average surface temperature would drop to 0 degrees Celsius after the first week, and then to minus 100 degrees by the end of the first year, Stevens says.

All the while, Earth’s oceans would grow ever colder, eventually freezing over, transforming Earth into an ice world but liquid underneath because ice is a good insulator, just like deep lakes in winter, only the surface would freeze, leaving a liquid ocean underneath. If any humans survived this extreme transformation, their only refuge, according to Stevens, would be near geothermal vents on the ocean floor.

These vents emit heat that wells up from the centre of the Earth.

Life on Earth would thrive for billions of years but not as we expect!

There is something called geothermal energy that comes from the beneath the earth crust. There are under ocean volcanoes in the deep ocean where complex life forms live without sun because they don't need one. They keep themselves by taking support for superheated water from the volcanoes. These complex life forms are called extremophiles. They generate energy from a process called chemosynthesis. They will never know that sun is no more or never know if it ever existed.

What lies beyond Apocalypse?

This artist’s impression shows the planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B, a member of the triple star system that is the closest to Earth. Alpha Centauri B is the most brilliant object in the sky and the other dazzling object is Alpha Centauri A. Our own Sun is visible to the upper right.

Right now, Earth is orbiting the sun at a blazing speed of 107,000 kilometers per hour. If the sun vanished, its gravitational pull would be gone, but Earth’s speed would remain the same but ejected in a trajectory tangential to the earth's revolutionary orbit the moment we realise the sun is no more.

To understand why, picture yourself tying a rock to the end of a string and then swinging that string in a circle over your head. Then you let go of the string. The rock goes flying in a straight line away from you, the same way that Earth would go flying in a straight line away from the central point in space where the sun used to sit.

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As long as Earth didn’t collide with any other planets, asteroids, or comets, it would only take about 377,000 hours (43,000 years) for it to traverse 4.3 light years — the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

And after 1 billion years, Steven calculates, Earth would have travelled 100,000 light years, or the length of the entire Milky Way Galaxy.

Who’s to say our tiny planet wouldn't get picked up and pulled into orbit by another star or, perhaps, a black hole? The Milky Way harbours an estimated 100 billion stars and as many as a billion black holes. Whatever the outcome, Earth’s future after no sun would be an exciting adventure across the cosmos.

Random Master

Author & Editor

Enjoy reading and be open to the things that world has to offer.