this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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I like the idea that it hit the core and knocked it out the other side while remaining in place like that one executive desk toy thing. Newton's cradle? is that what that thing is called.
Someone get Randall Monroe on this image, he'd do the math.
The thing that strikes me...the object hit the earth dead on, on the sunlit side, so the object would have come right out of the Sun or slightly behind. Like it looks like it was about 2 PM where the object hit. So the object would have barely missed the Sun...yesterday or so at the speed it would have to be moving to splat the Earth like a bullet through a melon.
I think to hit that hard it would need to be moving at a large fraction of the speed of light, in which case there would be a tremendous amount of nuclear fusion. Like, probably an exaton blast.
The thing is Randall already kind of did something like this in his "What-if?" which talked about a diamond meteor hitting the earth...
And basically it boils down to: Either Galileo/Newton/whoever was the smart fuck that discovered it was right and the meteor would only create a crater roughly as deep as it was itself. (This if it could touch the core it would be at least the same size as the earth and the picture would look different)
Or it would be going fast enough to ignore most of all that classical physics stuff, phase through most solid material and blow apart every piece of the earth because it would have enough energy to completely overcome the gravitational force holding everything to everything else here on earth.
(Now granted, those were the two extremes and there might just be a perfect balance in between, but I'm sure as hell not going to look for it! At the very least because getting funding for the experiments is seriously difficult for some reason...)