What If The Sun Disappeared?
Why Worldbuilding Stack Exchange recommends it
Worldbuilding Stack Exchange users link it when answering questions about Earth losing or being separated from the Sun, rogue planets, and how quickly the planet would freeze and what life could survive.
Recommended by 3 people across 3 different months, 2014 to 2020.
What it is
A Vsauce explainer on what would happen to Earth if the Sun suddenly vanished, covering the eight-minute delay before we notice, how gravity and light changes propagate, and how fast temperatures would fall afterward. Michael Stevens walks through the physics with sources and simulation tools listed in the description.
What people said
Recommends overactor · 2014-10 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “What would be the effects of traveling faster than light on a worldship?”
ABout the freezing, vsauce made An interesting video about that [this video] , which is also an relevant watch for the topic of this question in general. Take what you see with a grain of salt though and be sure to click through to some of the sources.
Recommends PipperChip · 2015-03 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “What would happen if a rogue planet entered our Solar System and stayed?”
FREEZING IS WHAT HAPPENS Earth is in what most people call "the Goldilocks Zone" because the temperature of our planet (and the energy we get from the sun) results in a planet that is not too warm, and not too cold. The formal name of this is the Circumstellar Habitable Zone [LINK] . Every star system, in theory, has one. For our particular solar system, the estimates [LINK] on the inner and outer boundary of the goldilocks zone is actually quite large. It looks like most conservative estimates place the edges around .99 to 1.3 AU. (Remember that 1 AU is the average distance from the earth to the sun.) If this planet knocked us further away, outside of our habitable zone, things would cool d
Recommends Gary Walker · 2016-03 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “The earth is flung into deep space”
VSauce sun disappearing - basically the same effect [this video] Just watched this video again, and as usual Michael tells the story in an interesting way. He is no scientist, but he checks his stories pretty carefully.
Cites Ethan Bierlein · 2014-10 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “How would rogue planet civilization track the passage of time?”
@TimB Vsauce actually did a video on this, you can find it here [this video] . In his video, he mentions that life could still exist near geothermal locations, such as iceland, or volcanic vents near the bottom of the ocean.
Cites Schwern · 2015-02 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “Are human batteries energy efficient?”
Second Law Of Thermodynamics [LINK] says every closed system loses energy (technically: the entropy of a closed system can only increase). Recycling Humans (or anything) to feed more Humans will lose energy at each generation. In the case of Humans a lot of energy because Humans are really bad at making electricity. The Sun obscured by clouds in The Matrix is still heating and warming the Earth, its only the direct solar energy that is blocked. This still leaves several ways of harnessing the Sun's power. Wave action Wind Heat pump [LINK] If the Sun were completely gone, there remain many, many reserves of power on the Earth. Vsauce covers this in his video "What If The Sun Disappeared" [VID
Cites user3106 · 2018-04 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “How can the human race disappear in a few days?”
What If The Sun Disappeared? [this video] It's going to take more than a week though according to to VSauce's research. Temperature is around freezing point after one week. After one year it's -73 Celsius.
Cites John · 2020-09 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “Earth was suddenly teleported away from the sun. Can we recover?”
@JustinThymetheSecond if you want some idea of how wrong you are, consider how fast the temprature drops when the sun goes down. consider how cold the artic is during the artic winter, the core is still heating the poles as much as it is the equator. without the sun the heat from the core alone results in a stable surface temprature close to pluto's, it would take less than a year for the surface temprature to reach -70 c. it takes less than 20 years for the atmosphere to start liquifying. [this video]