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Filling the Solar System with AIR - What would happen?
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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Huh. If it all snapped into existence, it'd catch the light traveling through space, at that moment. So Earth might briefly get brighter? The dark side obviously would, as Rayleigh scattering turns our penumbra blue... all the way out to fucking Neptune. On the bright side, at first, it would genuinely be more sky, but-- I don't-- I just cannot wrap my head around how to even model that. The entire solar system would flash as bright as the daytime sky, give or take a couple AU, for like a billisecond. And then that energy would bounce around until it's mostly absorbed, surely. The image of the sun might vanish instantly. Even on Earth I expect most photons do not arrive having dodged the entire atmosphere.
Thinking about modeling this ridiculous hypothetical is going to keep me up tonight.
I've been thinking about this alot, so if we change the scenario to the solar systems collides with a huge cloud of air just drifting in space, we would see the blue sky on the moving interface as the air spreads though the solar system.
It's quite magical in the minds eye.
Gradually gliding into a gaseous cloud that the sun lights up would be genuinely fascinating, but still probably kill everyone. Pros and cons.
... would it affect the northern hemisphere first? I have no idea which direction the solar system actually proceeds.
most everything in the milky way galaxy is orbiting the center of the galaxy clockwise relative to our north*, so we'd probably enter the gas cloud from the side by drifting into it faster than it is moving
*that's orbital north, the direction that's perpendicular to orbit and close-ish to the magnetic north pole (which is tilted relative to the orbit)