What would happen if you took the core temp. of our sun (14 million Kelvin) and at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) reduced it to 1 nanokelvin (one-billionth of a degree) above absolute zero?
…How does one effect a change of temperature at a speed expressed as the rate of change of distance over time? That’s like asking how many jelly beans per minute I need to eat to get from Chicago to Denver by Mother’s Day. :dubious:
If you mean to ask what would happen if the temperature of something changed from 14 million Kelvin to practically absolute zero very quickly, well, I expect the answer is that its temperature would drop from 14 million Kelvin to ~0 Kelvin very quickly. I don’t think there’s any more specific answer possible unless you make the physical scenario a bit less general.
The speed of light is just that, a speed. It doesn’t tell you how fast something is done, only how fast something is moving.
Based on the title and the question you’re talking about a shift “as fast as possible” which may as well be instantaneous.
Temperature is a property of an object or system; talking about changing ‘a temperature’ doesn’t work unless you have some idea of what it is that has that temperature.
What isn’t clear is what effect you’re looking for. Do you want to know what would happen to the Earth if this happened to the sun? Or the structure of some hypothetical piece of matter? Or are you wondering where the energy would come from/go?
Actually, while at first the question makes no sense at all, the truth is that the heat has to escape somewhere and the fastest this can happen is the speed of light. It’s questionable if this is what the OP meant, but given the benefit of the doubt I still don’t know what the answer would be.
If the sun were to spontaneously lose all of its heat, I suspect that gravity would cause the hydrogen to collapse on itself and it would start right up again from the heat.
ETA: I’m no astronomer, but when I say “start right up again”, I’m thinking anywhere from hundereds to millions of years to get back to normal.
You’d have a big hunk of cold, glassy metallic hydrogen on your hands.
The whole thing’d probably go bang after it contracts to the point that radiation pressure equals gravitational pressure.
I was going to say… from my introductory astronomy courses, doesn’t the thermonuclear reaction of the sun counteract it’s gravitational contraction? That’s how stars go nova isn’t it?
Sorta. Thing is, stars with sufficient mass, when they exhaust their hydrogen supply and start to collapse, don’t go supernova right then and there. The collapse increases heat and pressure in the core, which allows the helium to begin to fuse into carbon. The star will keep doing that through neon, oxygen, silicon, and finally, nickel-56 (which undergoes alpha decay and turns into iron). Once it’s reached this stage, fusion becomes an endothermic, rather than exothermic, process and so any further collapse won’t generate further outward pressure, and so will cause a supernova.
Long story short, even if the Sun suddenly had all the energy sucked out of it (which, considering the sun generates its own energy through fusion, seems a rather unlikely proposition), it wouldn’t go supernova. It might collapse a bit, but fusion would likely restart pretty quickly.
I asked this question as more of a poor man’s thought experiment ala Schrödinger’s cat. It was intended more as a theoretical/sci fi/metaphysical type question.
Setting all mathmatical equations aside, and regardless of how you went from hot to cold, instantaneously, or near instantaneous, what would happen? Would there be cataclysmic results, i.e. universe imploding/exploding, time stopping/reversing or taken out of the equation altoghter, universe disappearing, etc.
What would happen would depend to a very large extent on how it happened. Ignoring the “how” makes the question utterly meaningless on any level you choose including “theoretical/sci fi/metaphysical”. It’s gobbledygook.