What if the sun disappeared?

Hello internet. It is I, TheFalconPawncher, and I will talk about what would happen if the Sun suddenly disappeared.

Now don't get me wrong, the sun won't just fizzle out suddenly. Instead, it'll grow to a red giant, enveloping Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth.

Most people would say something like "Everyone would die instantly" or "The Earth and the people living on it will freeze in a matter of seconds. Even I said that before. But, fortunately, that's not the case. Since the Earth has greenhouse gases that can trap heat, if the sun disappeared, the Earth will still be warm...but not for long. First what would happen is probably mass panic enveloping the world. I mean, come on, it's kind of obvious. What would you do? Anyways, yeah. Mass panic. However, since the Sun's light takes about eight minutes to reach us, we would have no idea that the sun disappeared. Everything and everyone would be fine for eight minutes more. It also takes eight minutes for the gravitational pull to finally die out since gravity waves move at the speed of light. After eight minutes, the Earth would fly out in a straight line tangent to wherever it was.

For plants, photosynthesis would stop immediately. Without the sun, plants wouldn't be able to inhale carbon dioxide and exhale life-sustaining oxygen. However, since the atmosphere has so much oxygen, it would take us thousands of years to run out of oxygen. But what about temperature? The Earth is quite warm right now, but without the sun to keep giving us heat, the Earth would radiate away its heat exponentially, meaning that it would lose heat quick then happen slower and slower.

At the first week without the sun, the average temperature would be freezing, which is 0°C (32°F). For the next month or two, things would be okay, but by the end of the first year, the average temperature would be -73°C (-100°F). At that time, it would be best to move to geothermal areas, such as Yellowstone or Iceland. But even though there isn't any sun, the Earth still produces its own heat. Below the crust, the Earth is hot. In there, radiative elements decay, providing the energy needed to keep the Earth's core at 5000°C (9000°F). Within the next 10-20 years, things will start to get wet...with dew. But now with glorious water droplets, but oxygen droplets. The air will be cold enough for the oxygen to freeze into a liquid.

But let's go back. At 1-2 years with no sun, the oceans of Earth will freeze over. But ice is less dense than liquid water, which means that ice floats. And ice is a pretty good insulator. So, even after billions of years after the Sun disappeared, liquid water could still exist at the bottom of the oceans by being protected from the cold Earth by miles of ice, and warmed by hydrothermal vents. Instead of being a frozen and lifeless rock, extremophiles, like microbes and tardigrades (I made a pretty cool post about tardigrades, you should go check it out) will be thriving near those vents. They would be fine without ever knowing that the Sun disappeared. Honestly, they probably think that there isn't a Sun in the first place.

It's amazing to know that even without the sun, with the Earth flying through space, things would kind of be fine. The Earth would be flying through space at a pretty fast rate. After about a billion years, Earth would have traveled 100,000 light years, a trip that can potentially take it through the milky way, near billions of stars. And nothing is to say that it'll fall into orbit with another star...thaw out...and let the extremeophiles and microbes still living under there to spread life and evolve all over again...into new intelligent species...then they could uncover things that were part of our lives...maybe they could even find this very blog and post...well in that case...Hi. I'm Bryant and...you're welcome for this blog about your planets history...so thanks for reading.

Interesting fact of the day: The "message received" tone on a Nokia phone is Morse code for "SMS"!