Posted on 05/19/2026 12:44:11 PM PDT by Red Badger
You would have time to make peace with what has happened.
A fully frozen Earth... that would be the result!
Image Credit: Art Knights / Shutterstock.com
It is Terrifying Affair Thursday, and we are imagining a scenario that could never happen, but is wonderfully fun to explore. And in case it becomes a ridiculous conspiracy theory like Earth losing gravity for 7 seconds, at least we are ahead of the curve in debunking it. The scenario for the day is what if the Sun somehow disappears? Magically vanishes from the center of the Solar System. What would happen next?
Well, for the first 8 minutes and 20 seconds, literally nothing would happen. We wouldn’t even know it’s gone, and our planet wouldn’t feel it. That's because the Sun is about 150 million kilometers (around 93 million miles) away, and 8 minutes and 20 seconds is the time it takes for both its light and gravity to reach us.
Light and gravity both move with the same speed – the speed of light, or 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second – in a vacuum, something that was suspected for a long time and finally confirmed by the detection of gravitational waves. We wouldn't notice anything was wrong at first because we are always looking at the Sun as it existed just over 8 minutes ago. Which means we'd still be traveling around the spot it used to be for 8 minutes, too.
After we realize the Sun is gone, things would go bad pretty quickly. Yet, maybe not as quickly as you might imagine.
Both hemispheres would be in darkness, and our planet would go off on a literal tangent, a mostly straight line from the last place it felt the gravity of the Sun. You might think there will be chaos, what with seven other planets also losing their star, but every Solar System body would begin moving in a straight line, and they are extremely unlikely to cross. Planets are pretty far away from each other, despite what pictures of the Solar System show.
One possibility for chaos is Jupiter (it's always Jupiter). The Sun contains most of the mass in the Solar System – a whopping 99.86 percent – but the king of the planets holds the next biggest fraction. Big enough to technically not orbit the Sun at all. The Sun and Jupiter's gravitational dance keeps plenty of asteroids in certain regions; without the Sun, these would be disrupted in quite creative ways that could bring about collisions.
In general, though, collisional scenarios are very unlikely. Anyway, we have bigger worries on Earth. It would be a matter of days before the surface temperature plummets below zero. With some optimistic approximation, we'd get about 20 days before the average surface temperature is at the freezing point of water.
In that time, most plants and animals would have died off, either directly from the lack of sunlight and drop in temperature or due to the death of their food source. Humans would also start dying in the millions. Temperatures would continue to plummet, eventually reaching a temperature similar to what’s measured on Pluto today, just tens of degrees above absolute zero.
Is this the end for life on Earth? Not necessarily. The deep ocean might remain liquid for a long time, and our planet’s internal heat would be sufficient for the organisms thriving in the proximity of deep oceanic vents.
Humans, too, might have a chance to survive. While life in submarines is certainly a possibility, the best chance for humanity to survive is Iceland. The country already uses geothermal energy for a large fraction of its current use, so it could step it up as the rest of us die frozen and in the dark.
But seeing as we have been consuming the planet's natural resources at a rate that far exceeds its capacity to renew them for a number of years now, sorry, there's likely no happy ending with this one!
I like the image. If you use your imagination, you can almost make out the continents of the World.
You wouldn't know about it until 8 minutes and 20 seconds after it happened.
Speed of light and all.
No, immediately. W/o the Sun’s gravitational pull, the Earth would immediately launch in whatever vector it was traveling when the Sun disappeared. This sudden shift in inertia, direction and the loss of the Sun’s constant gravity would yield massive earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes...you name it, would not be good.
On the ‘good’ side, however is we’d only have to endure the cataclysm until everything, especially us, froze solid.
There’s a great sci-fi story called Sunout about what would happen during the time between the sun started to change and the end.
Sorry, but, no, we wouldn't. There's no way we could get the news faster than the sunlight going out.
We need a universal alert system to sync so everyone of earth can turn on their floor heaters at once
Like the tree in the woods....If it happened at night.....did it really happen??
IFL"Science" channeling Paul Ehrlich.
From the IFL"Science" Website
Our Mission
At IFLScience, our mission is to share the wonder and relevance of science with a global audience. We strive to present scientific knowledge
Any contrary scientific views or ideas are apparently not welcome. I did several searches on their website. Any mention contrary to the Globull Warning religion had the label "Denier."
IFL
Insane Flatulating Liberal Science
How fast do gravity waves propagate?
Since energy is something they seem to be adamant at slowly weening us off of by overpricing and, in some cases, limiting our access to, I've chosen to try to make our household somewhat energy self-reliant. We're currently not 100% energy self-reliant (I have to buy 20% of our power from the grid, because our solar/inverter/battery system supplies 80% of the power we consume throughout the year). But we're self-reliant enough that most energy price shocks have little direct impact on our budget. That's with us having to buy little gasoline (what little we drive our gas pickup instead of our EV) and having to buy no natural gas (house is all-electric). It'd be cost prohibitive for now to try to make the home and EV charging 100% off-grid (handling even many days in a row of cloudy/rainy weather without changing our energy consumption habits like driving the EV 1,500 miles/month or getting into the hot tub whenever we want or setting the HVAC to whatever temp we want).
If their energy pressure tactics have little effect on us, my wife and I will be less inclined to be tempted to comply with the left's demands (i.e. bowing to the left's trans/hedonism gods won't be slowly more and more attractive in their slow boiling frog approach has little impact on our lives). And with experimenting with the energy project for 5 years and still studying it, I'm teaching it to our grown kids and their spouses, at least the ones who live in the south, as each one settles into their forever homes. If that works, I'll teach it to my church family as well.
Wouldn’t you know it? Just when you go 100% solar, Old Sol goes Poof! I thought things like that only happened to me.
On the bright side, I won’t have to worry about my car’s extended warranty.
And all the food in my fridge & freezer will stay cold w/o electricity. 👍
And the tides suddenly rising or falling depending, as gravity travels at the same speed as light.
“Hold on to your butts!”
“But seeing as we have been consuming the planet’s natural resources at a rate that far exceeds its capacity to renew them for a number of years now, sorry, there’s likely no happy ending with this one!”
My ‘pronouns’ are, ‘SHUT’ and ‘UP!’
Sunlight does not affect gravity. The tides would not change unless the sun and moon just ceased to exist.
LOL! :)
But seeing as we have been consuming the planet’s natural resources at a rate that far exceeds its capacity to renew them for a number of years now, sorry, there’s likely no happy ending with this one!
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