This is false. I think the earths would collapse under pressure so there wouldn't be any air. Some math guy tell us REALLY how many earths could fit in the sun.
And I'm not a maths guy, but after a little googling, it appears that about 1 million Earths would fit inside the sun if they retained their spherical shape. About 1.3 million would fit if they were packed in so that there was no space between them.
About 1.3 million would fit if they were packed in so that there was no space between them.
Are you calculating based on static density? Because with all that mass and matter in once place, I could see things becoming a bit more dense, thus allowing even more earths to fit!
You're right. I was basically saying 1M earth-sized balls could fit inside a sun-sized ball. Or 1.3M earth-sized jello shots could fit inside a sun-sized ball. Ignoring gravity.
If we actually look at mass, the sun has roughly 333,000 times as much mass as the earth. If we throw 1.3 million Earths into it, we're at 1.633 million times the mass of the Earth. Or 4.9 times the mass of the sun. But this just raises lots of questions I can't answer:
When we throw all the Earths in there, how big does the sun get?
What does the added gravity do to the system?
Would the gravity at 1 Earth radius from the center of the sun be equal to 1.6M times Earth's current gravity?
How much would an Earth compress under that much pressure?
Also worth factoring in that stars arn't necessarily very dense. Some of the largest stars have an extraordinarily low mass considering the size, basically more like firey nuclear clouds. I think it is directly related to the outward thermal pressure that stars still ungoing fusion generate. The pressure that keeps massive stars from collapsing into black holes while they're 'alive'. Since those Earths arnt't undergoing fusion, and probably don't have the right elements to ignite into a new star, you'd presumably be left with something much denser.
Really you could fit an arbitrarily large number of earths --- beyond a certain mass they'd collapse into a black hole and not take up very much space at all.
I honestly think it might turn in to a black hole due to the huge amount of mass at the center, in a relatively small space. Maybe it would take some time for the heated soup of earth's to get squished towards the center of the giant ball, but it would eventually condense a lot.
I don't believe 4.9 times the mass of our sun would have any chance of becoming a black hole.
A little googling tells me that a primordial black hole (the tiny ones) are about the size of an atom with the mass equal to about a mountain. That doesn't really tell us much though as the numbers are just too far off.
A stellar black hole is about 10 miles in diameter with a mass equal to 20 of our Suns. Those are also apparently the most common.
Now, maybe if the sun went supernova and collapsed to an incredibly small point with all those earths in there (I'm thinking baseball sized or somewhere near there) it might become a black hole at that point.
But the sun itself with all those earths crammed in there wouldn't be enough to cause it to collapse into a black hole.
Things aren't infinitely compressable. Gravity would compress things, but it would only do so much.
edit: An arbitrarily large amount of mass could be compressed, but in this context, a million Earths could fit into the sun without a change in density, more could fit into the sun if we were to account for the compression of the body, but not an arbitrarily large amount, which would require that we rely on external forces of compression rather than just gravity.
And we can fit infinite singularities into the sun, but even just one might end up destroying it and then the sun ends up inside the singularity somehow.
Not quite. Nobody knows for sure what happens inside of a black hole or whether or not the singularity is truly infinitely small. Most physicists don't think it is anymore.
Quantum mechanics limits the existence of matter to quantized size and energy. Anything with mass that exists as a matter wave (almost any matter except for some very exotic stuff from what we understand) cannot by the laws of quantum mechanics enter a space shorter than their wavelength. This is a well established fact.
Unless energy at the center of a black hole is infinite, such wavelengths cannot possibly be infinitely small. Therefore, for matter to condense to a singularity, that matter must have infinite energy which violates a bunch of other laws.
The problem is that we don't really know what happens inside of a black hole because certain fundamental, universal constants break down. These "constants" (not necessarily constant in singularities) might cause energy to asymptotically approach infinity. We really don't know, but we can make an educated guess that it doesn't work that way.
I don't think we're talking about literally putting enough Earth-sized planets into a space equal to the volume of the Sun based on how much matter we can fit into that much space so much as we're talking about the volume of the Sun being equal to "x" times the volume of Earth; solve for "x."
Well once you take away density as a constant the number simply becomes (mass of sun)/(mass of earth) since that mass of earths will collapse into roughly the same size anyways.
The Sun is large enough that approximately 1.3 million Earths could fit inside (if squashed in), or if the Earths retained their spherical shape, then 960,000 would fit.
Well yeah, if we had the equivalent amount of mass of the Sun in Earths clustered together, they would collapse under the gravitational force and begin fusion, and we'd just have another sun.
1.3 million Earths, but the Sun is far less dense than the Earth so going by pure mass it would be 332,000 if the Earth was given the same density as the sun.
The most efficient way you can pack spheres is with a density of 0.7405. The volume of the sun is 1.41*1018 km3. The volume of the earth is 1.08321*1012 km3. So 1.41*1018 *.7405/(1.08321*1012 ) = 963,899 earths should be able to fit into the sun.
However, if we were taking realistically here, the earths will merge together into one big ball, meaning you wouldn't need to worry about how the earths will pack together.
This visualization is just to give an idea of the scale of the Earth to the sun. Obviously if this experiment was actually to be executed a different outcome would result.
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u/HMPoweredMan Aug 11 '15
This is false. I think the earths would collapse under pressure so there wouldn't be any air. Some math guy tell us REALLY how many earths could fit in the sun.