Just throw it in the sun.

[Chardok]

So I had a dream last night, where apparently, I had a friend from Venus, and there was an asteroid coming what would destroy Venus and possibly earth secondarily somehow. but anyway, the Venusians' solution to avoid disaster was to push mercury into the sun, eliminating it's gravitational something-or-other thereby causing the asteroid-thing to miss.


My argument against this was that if you throw mercury into the sun, the entire planet would INSTANTANEOUSLY be vaporized, creating a massive shockwave of...something that would DEFINITELY destroy both Venus AND Earth. Now, I know that is ridiculous, but it was a dream, and it got me to wondering:

What would happen if you just threw mercury at the sun? Let's assume that you throw it so fast that a significant portion doesn't melt/boil away over a long period of time. like....it flash vaporizes or whatever. what sort of energy would that release? big boom boom?

[SilverWingedSeraph]

My question is why they didn't just deflect the asteroid if they have the capability to toss planets into the sun. Well, that was my question until I remembered that dream logic is always rather goofy. I'm not actually sure what would happen though... an interesting question. Well, the surface temperature of the sun is 5778 Kelvin, and the boiling point of Iron is 3134 Kelvin. Since Mercury is, I believe, mostly composed of Iron... I'm assuming a lot of it would be very rapidly vaporised, but I have no idea what effect that would have in the Sun. Probably not too much though, I'm guessing, since you could fit 21 million Mercurys into the Sun... but we'll see what the people who know more science have to say on the subject.

[NoXion]

~99% of the solar system's mass is bound up in the Sun, IIRC. I don't think Mercury falling into the Sun would do anything other than cause some local disturbances.

[Simon_Jester]

The sun doesn't put out enough power to flash-vaporize a planet; it certainly doesn't put out enough power to do that when you divide the total power output by the cross-section of the planet (the bit that's soaking up solar heat).

If you try to throw/drop something into the sun fast enough that it flash-vaporizes, it will plow deep into the sun's interior and slow to a stop after crashing into things, as a big ball of probably-mostly-I-dunno-liquid metal.

You'd be more likely to get nasty solar weather from the effects of that (planet ramming the sun at ludicrous speed) than from any blast of vaporized material from Mercury.

I'm afraid this was just dream logic, guys, unless I'm getting my astrophysics badly wrong.

[Patrick Degan]

The more likely event would be that Mercury would be torn apart by the Sun's tidal force once the planet surpassed the solar Roche's Limit. The sun would acquire its own ring system for a time.

[Dalton]

This really sounds like a Syfy original movie. You should consider writing a screenplay.

The gravitational effects might be interesting, if not noticeable. Pluto was discovered due in part to aberrations in Uranus' and Neptune's predicted orbits.

[Zaune]

This really sounds like a Syfy original movie. You should consider writing a screenplay.

Don't say that, they might end up making it!

[Shinova]

And be careful, it may actually end up being good. :O

[Sithking Zero]

And be careful, it may actually end up being good. :O

With a Sci-Fi original movie? I believe that there's something about a few things happening before that does. "Hell freezing over," and "Pigs Flying," come to mind.

Unless... wait... was the Battlestar Galactica miniseries a Sci-Fi original movie?

But back on topic, I don't think that Mercury would have much effect on the rest of the solar system, particularly Venus. Plus, if they have the tech to push a planet, most likely with a jillion (yes, that is the scientific term for it) times the mass of an asteroid, couldn't they just push the asteroid into the sun? or into a geosynch orbit around their planet to practice their hand at asteroid mining?

Or better yet, blow it up! Besides, Venus has an atmosphere many, many times denser than ours. If it was blown up and it started to come down through the ultradense atmosphere and acid clouds, they would more likely than not loose a huge amount of mass and wouldn't do nearly the damage an equivalent scenario would on good ol' Terra.

Correct me if I'm wrong, ladies and/or gentlemen.

[Johonebesus]

This really sounds like a Syfy original movie. You should consider writing a screenplay.

The gravitational effects might be interesting, if not noticeable. Pluto was discovered due in part to aberrations in Uranus' and Neptune's predicted orbits.

Wasn't that actually an accident arising from errors? They didn't have enough information to accurately predict the outer planets' motion, so they mistakenly thought there must be another one out there, and by chance someone saw a tiny speck in about the location that the faulty math said a planet should be. As better data was acquired they realized that Pluto wasn't necessary to explain Uranus' orbit, and the estimate of Pluto's mass was reduced again and again until they figured out it was smaller than the moon.

[Caiaphas]

I'm going with the dream logic people here. Mercury is pretty tiny in comparison with the rest of the solar system. Even if it was flash-vaporized (which isn't going to happen, seeing as Simon_Jester's correct with his astrophysics), even if Mercury isn't torn to pieces when it hits the Roche limit, and even if a perfectly hemispherical shockwave arose from the flash-vaporization, with all of its mass spread over the edge of that hemisphere, we're talking only about 4.488 kilograms of matter per square meter. If you add up all of the mass that's going to intersect Venus, that's only about 1.033 * 10^15 kilograms of vaporized Mercury. To put it into comparison, that's a fifth of Eros. Venus might get fried from all the KE that matter is going to dump into the atmosphere, but I doubt a civilization that can toss around planets wouldn't have bunkers capable of dealing with a few extra hundred Kelvin, and it's not like there's anything to burn there anyways. And this is Venus, which is a few million kilometers closer to the blast than Earth.

This really sounds like a Syfy original movie. You should consider writing a screenplay.

Please don't. I'm already traumatized from all the others.

[Kingmaker]

Well, Mercury would melt, and all the now-liquefied hyperdense uranium in the dirt would sink to the center of the molten core, causing the planet to reach critical mass. Except it would be a sort of super-critical mass, because the pressure would prevent the uranium from exploding at regular critical mass. This massive explosion would trigger a fusion reaction in the center of the Sun!