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.
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.
We would need enough advance notice to prepare for massively farming mushrooms or something underground to eat. Canned food will run out in a few years, even military MREs have a shelf life. A few lucky people might survive a generation, but there’s a minimal breeding stock requirement to avoid degeneration from inbreeding. Extremely long odds, I think the human race would only survive this event in a sci-fi fantasy story.
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?
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.
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?
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 trillions 1.7e17 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.
Wouldn’t the planet rapidly start to cool? I think we’d be dead by morning
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.
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.
We would need enough advance notice to prepare for massively farming mushrooms or something underground to eat. Canned food will run out in a few years, even military MREs have a shelf life. A few lucky people might survive a generation, but there’s a minimal breeding stock requirement to avoid degeneration from inbreeding. Extremely long odds, I think the human race would only survive this event in a sci-fi fantasy story.
I don’t know if I would call them the lucky ones.
Fuck you I’m going underground
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.
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 icyThe 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
Most cities have brighter light pollution than the moon can provide.