Effects of a 10^60 Decrease in Solar Photon Energy on Earth's Temperature

  • Thread starter Thread starter bhsmith
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Energy Photon
bhsmith
Messages
37
Reaction score
0
What would happen if the Energy of the photons from the sun decreased by 10^60?
I think it means that the Earth would be colder than it is because the sun is not emmiting as much heat, but I'm not sure if that is correct. Thanks for any help!
 
Physics news on Phys.org
A factor of 10^60 decrease in the energy output of the sun would make it basically a completely black ball. The solar luminosity is something like 10^26W, so dividing that by 10^60 gets you some ridiculously small number like 10^-44W...

The Earth would no longer have an external energy source, and would cool down to very frigid temperatures. It takes a little bit of time for this to happen though because the Earth has an atmosphere which traps heat, but after a couple of...days or weeks (I'm not sure how long it would actually take), the Earth would be a baron wasteland.
 
Matterwave said:
A factor of 10^60 decrease in the energy output of the sun would make it basically a completely black ball. The solar luminosity is something like 10^26W, so dividing that by 10^60 gets you some ridiculously small number like 10^-44W...

The Earth would no longer have an external energy source, and would cool down to very frigid temperatures. It takes a little bit of time for this to happen though because the Earth has an atmosphere which traps heat, but after a couple of...days or weeks (I'm not sure how long it would actually take), the Earth would be a baron wasteland.

I think such a sudden reduction in output without having burned through its store of nuclear fuel would result in a sudden collapse, nova, and re-ignition... every part of which which kill us. Matterwave's answer is as good as any. I would suspect that it would take a great deal of time for all life to die, at least those stranger forms that seem to eschew sunlight and live on geothermal processes.
 
Insights auto threads is broken atm, so I'm manually creating these for new Insight articles. Towards the end of the first lecture for the Qiskit Global Summer School 2025, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Olivia Lanes (Global Lead, Content and Education IBM) stated... Source: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/quantum-entanglement-is-a-kinematic-fact-not-a-dynamical-effect/ by @RUTA
If we release an electron around a positively charged sphere, the initial state of electron is a linear combination of Hydrogen-like states. According to quantum mechanics, evolution of time would not change this initial state because the potential is time independent. However, classically we expect the electron to collide with the sphere. So, it seems that the quantum and classics predict different behaviours!
According to recent podcast between Jacob Barandes and Sean Carroll, Barandes claims that putting a sensitive qubit near one of the slits of a double slit interference experiment is sufficient to break the interference pattern. Here are his words from the official transcript: Is that true? Caveats I see: The qubit is a quantum object, so if the particle was in a superposition of up and down, the qubit can be in a superposition too. Measuring the qubit in an orthogonal direction might...
Back
Top