Interesting, so you are saying light is faster than gravity?
Comment on 8 Minutes
bluemellophone@lemmy.world 2 months agoIt takes 8 minutes for the light to travel from the sun to Earth. Because light in a vacuum travels faster than anything, including information, we would not and could not know it had disappeared for 8 minutes. This means Earth would continue to follow its orbit around a non-existent sun for 8 minutes because the Sun’s gravity would still be acting on the Earth.
If it was nighttime, you wouldn’t notice the sudden lack of sunlight (other than if it was a full moon) but you’d almost certainly notice the change in gravity.
cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Equal to speed of light in vacuum
nublug@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
light speed = gravity speed
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
If someone who has the mental energy factchecks this pls share
mattreb@feddit.it 2 months ago
you’d almost certainly notice the change in gravity.
Really? can you actually percieve the sun gravity? Do you mean that we would get like a tsunami beause of the tidal effect? Now I kinda want a documentary about this.
abfarid@startrek.website 2 months ago
It’s weird to say that light travels faster than information, because light is information. In other words, top speed for information IS speed of light.
lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
I think that’s just the wording. My interpretation of that is any satellite or space probe sending back readings to Earth wouldn’t be faster than the sun visually disappearing from the sky. Even with the information being transmitted at the speed of light, there’s always going to be some sort of processing delay, along with the limited bandwidth of the transmission.
ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I don’t think you’d actually “notice” the gravity.
Earth would still retain it’s mass, and we’re much closer to it, so it’s lesser mass acts much more on us than the sun’s greater.
Though, the moon would stop orbiting the sun and travel on a mostly tangential path, instead of the elliptical path it currently travels.
This is a very interesting physics question that I may look into further. Specifically what would the theoretical acceleration be, due to the lack of the sun? Is it above a humans level of perception?
ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Gravitysimulator.org has an interface you can simulate what happens, though it’s timeframe is on the order of days. Not seconds.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Why would it travel radially away? The resulting gravity wave from a disappearing stun much push the Earth a little, but changing its orbit that drastically would mostly destroy Earth anyway.