Yup, and you do that by providing more details. Like, you provided the detail that you wanted the planets’ initial positions and velocities to be the same as in our solar system. And then you can do your calculations. But that might or might not be the details that were imagined in the original scenario, and different details give different answers.
Albert Einstein once said: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating.
He could not actually "pursue a beam of light with the velocity c", so would you have told him to stop thinking about what would happen if he did, since “you can’t use science to say what happens as a result”? His thought experiment led to his special theory of relativity.
I wouldn’t need to tell him that, because that’s the same conclusion that he came to all by himself.
That sounds cool. Which museum is that? Wonder if they have those photos on line.
I have always wanted to live on a moon of Saturn. In a thought-experiment way, not by being dropped there with no other changes.
Most of the moons don’t give a great display of the rings, as they orbit in the same plane. Mimas is probably the best, being both close and orbiting 1.5 degrees out of the plane (or it tilts or wobbles or something)
It’s at the Buffalo Museum of Science. I don’t think they have photos on line.
hmm. OK put me in a space station that is in a 45 degree inclination. And spin the station for gravity. Thank you.
Just use a computer simulation to put your camera wherever you want:
There are YouTube videos showing the planets replacing Earth’s moon. I can’t post a link though.
True. Actor and filmmaker Jason Bateman came up with a different/similar idea on his “Smarless” podcast: if the Sun were replaced by an enormous mirror, we would be able to see a reflection of Earth as it appeared in the past (16 minutes ago). In the article below, Brian Cox validates this idea:
You’re right - physicist Brian Cox finally confirms Jason Bateman’s long-running space theory
Um, yes? What’s so remarkable about that one?
The only difficulty with that 16 minute mirror idea is that if you did replace the Sun with a mirror, that’d simultaneously eliminate the source of illumination for the Earth. Once unilluminated, so it’s effectively night everywhere on Earth, the black Earth would be very hard to spot against the similar blackness of space.
Yes, yes, city lights are readily visible from low Earth orbit. But there’s a big damned difference between trying to see that level of detail from ~100 miles away and from 2 x 93million = 186million miles away.
To anticipate a question, Yes there’d be light enroute from the sun to illuminate Earth for about 8 more minutes after the mirror was installed.
Well, no, that’s not the only difficulty. You’d also have the difficulty of seeing interesting details in something 2 AU away, especially if the mirror were of a reasonable (i.e., extremely small) size.
Good point; thank you. “Only” is really misplaced there.
Even if the mirror was a sphere the same size as the Sun, from the mirror’s POV the Earth subtends a truly teeny angle I’m not going to bother computing. At its most distant, Venus is ~20% closer to Earth than the round-trip Earth-mirror-Earth distance. So for round numbers, Earth would appear in the mirror smaller than, but not much smaller than how Venus appears at max distance. Which is as a small disc just barely bigger than a point. And at best about 2/3rds as bright, assuming the mirror has perfect reflectivity and a few other assumptions too.
Maybe the fact that it makes ordinary people think about the physical world in relative terms. Most of us tend to take relativity metaphorically, like when we agree we all perceive time differently (because of subjective time). How many passengers in your subway car know the exact reason why we experience seasons?
Speaking of remarkability. I remember when I first read a detailed book about the nine planets in our Solar System and went over the description of Pluto. I had a similar reaction because I couldn’t understand how an almost random rock in the Kuiper Belt could be classified as a planet. But I had to accept what smarter people than me had decided.
I have watched episodes in a series about the Solar System presented by Brian Cox and he can often offer interesting perspectives on things.
Eh. Einsteinian relativity has just about zero to do with a magic mirror substituting for the Sun.
The less-than-instant speed of light becomeing an human-observable duration over that 2AU non-trivial distance is the only gee-whiz aspect of that thought experiment.
Yeah, I don’t see what the mirror has to do with relativity, or with the Earth’s seasons. When you look in your bathroom mirror, you’re seeing yourself as you were a couple of nanoseconds earlier. I guess that’s interesting if you’ve never considered it before, but it’s not a particularly deep insight.
Returning to the OP’s hypothetical, I think that Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars would be instantly devoured. Jupiter and Saturn, too, probably less than a day later. Certainly soon.
Pretty much everything else in the solar system would be drawn toward the black hole at relativistic speeds, but anything outside about 11.85 AU (in this case) would be safe from being eaten because that’s the limit of the innermost stable orbit. Uranus would be the closest major body outside that limit. But the distance between the innermost stable orbit and Uranus would be about the same as the current distance between the Earth and Saturn.
Uranus would reach about .30c before being ejected into space. Neptune would reach about .25c before meeting the same fate. The Trans-Neptunian Objects like Pluto and Sedna would be similarly ejected at something like .2c. Of course, all the moons would have been stripped away and would follow their own trajectories.
Likely only the cores of the ejected bodies would survive intact.
Any lucky debris that managed to find a stable orbit just outside the 11.85 AU limit would be moving at around .4c.
I think the worst example of that was somewhere where I read that Saturn was less dense than water so that if there was a vast universal ocean Saturn would float. Try as I might I could not get my imagination to violate enough laws of physics to visualize that scenario.
What assumptions are you making there, @GreysonCarlisle ? If it’s same initial positions and velocities, then all of the planets would fall in. If it’s the same orbital paths (with velocities adjusted so as to make that possible), then nothing would be ejected into space, because we’re taking the lack of ejection as a basic premise.