RE: Science Porn
January 22, 2016 at 10:18 pm
(This post was last modified: January 22, 2016 at 10:53 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(January 22, 2016 at 12:57 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: I might do some actual maths later, but 3 minutes exposure to the total luminosity of the sun is going to be a little rough on the planet.
Just noodling this out mentally, doing E=MC\2 on
ONE BILLION TONS OF MASS
is going to make quite a bang. I'm thinking the earth gets pulverized/powderized/vaporized from the shock wave.
Assuming the sun does put out equivalent of a billion tons mass worth of energy every 3 minutes, it Seems to me an order of magnitude calculation says a billion tons of mass converted to energy would be around 10e26 Jules. Gravitational binding energy of the earth would be 6 orders of magnitude more than that.
Earth won't pulverize into an expanding, gravitationally unbound, ball of dust from just 3 minutes of total solar output, not even 3 years.
Sorry.
The Death Star super laser that blows Aldaaran into a gravitationally unbound cloud of debris with a single almost instantaneous shot would have to have a power output about a billion times greater than the sun, and somehow ensure the beam won't just bore a hole through the planet and go out the other side before the planet can collapse into upon the hole.
If such a laser is built, it would be focusing the power output not of a star, but of a supernova into a laser like beam. Such a beam would literally be visible to the naked eye from across the entire universe.
Wonder if anyone working on Star Wars script ever had any inkling of the implied power of Death Star.