If I understand that right, gravity also moves in space at the speed of light, therefore Earth will keep on orbiting for 8min around nothing?
That is correct as weird as it sounds
The sun could be gone but its influence would remain. Kinda like getting out of a pool and looking back to see the waves on the surface that you caused.
Wouldn’t you see the effect on the moon?
Only if the moon is up.
Moon is a fake bitch.
Imagine seeing the moon just switch off
That would be a beautiful, terrifying sight. You could gaze up at the most amazing view of the stars as the whole world froze to death.
I wonder if you had the opportunity to do so leisurely.
A suddenly vanishing sun would also mean a spectularly high energy gravity wave hitting the earth. You might be dead before even realizing that anything is off…
There is a really great short story by Larry Niven based on a similar premise:
“Inconstant Moon”
There is also an “Outer Limits” episode based on this. I watched that before knowing the short story and it is one of only 2 or three OL episodes that I still have an active memory of…
Yup
If you can see the moon (if it is “up” at night).
There’s a pretty cool short story where a guy is looking at the full moon and he realizes that it’s gotten way too bright, and that could only happen because the sun has just spontaneously exploded, and he basically just makes peace with the fact that the world is going to be destroyed very shortly.
It goes to 9 minutes from 8, since every single communication gadget will yell out that the sun has disappeared as reports come in from the other side of the earth.
Depending on the lunar cycle, the night time side would notice the moon become dim.
That is actually correct. The difference of being on the opposite side that faces the sun is just a few thousandths of a second, but it is there.
Now I am curious, somebody explain. if it just stopped burning, would we know after 8 mins, if we lived on the opposite side?
It 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.
Edit: actually, you wouldn’t feel any difference in gravity or experience any change of acceleration. What you would experience is a very tiny vibration, of 1 million push notifications being sent to your phone from the other side of the planet.
Interesting, so you are saying light is faster than gravity?
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.
But we do have Twitter now.
Not anymore…
Or they will postulate its the left who put up a fake screen on the sky
Well they’re not entirely wrong… I mean I turn off my notifications when I go to sleep.
All we can see is 8 minutes into the sun’s past.
unless you’re sleeping - 8 minutes and maybe 30 seconds to start seeing posts online, 10 minutes to start getting news about it
I don’t know about you, but if I start seeing headlines about the Sun vanishing, I’m assuming it’s a hoax and going back to bed.
then wait until the 10min mark then! Would be rather odd if all news sources in unison decided to pull a prank like that
In about 8 minutes and 20 seconds, we would lose the Sun’s gravitational force. Namely, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second or 299,000 kilometers per second). This also means that we would be in complete darkness 8 minutes after the Sun disappears
https://curiousmatrix.com/what-would-happen-if-the-sun-disappeared/
What I wanna know is if gravitational waves travel at the speed of light all the time or are they influenced by media like light.
