I love this simulation. I makes me deeply uncomfortable in a weird way. Not because of a future concern, but the memory that our planet was once jiggly molten chaos after a collision with a similarly sized body. I studied astrophysics... I rationally know this. But seeing it makes my tummy feel bad. Love it.
It's kinda like the visualisation of what would happen to a small object (like a human) passing through the atmosphere of Jupiter towards the core... The compression as you pass through thicker and thicker layers of matter and closer to the center of gravity. I picture it more often than most, because it makes me feel icky and I'm grim I guess.
Even without perfectly understanding the physics behind such events, just the sheer VIOLENCE of this impact is insane
I mean we live on that ball, it's quite literally our whole world and it's absolutely massive from our perspective, to just see it being it with such force that it basically liquefies is almost incomprehensible
Not just the violence, but the speed of that violence. Like in my head, despite knowing how fast these things are moving, the collision is slow - Theia over time scraping against the surface and crushing things. But that’s absolutely not what happens. This is all over in less than a day. That’s insane.
I discovered a few years back that I have an irrational phobia of massive celestial bodies. Like celestial megalophobia. It's mainly the idea of falling into the gravity well of anything between the size of Jupiter to a black hole.
It's such an absurd and existential kind of "fear" since of course I'm probably never going to experience it. But at the same time I cannot help but be drawn to videos, movies and games where I'm reminded of that fear lol
The movie Melancholia put me into an emotional funk for an hour after watching it. I get the impending disaster was a metaphor, but the concept was terrifying without any deeper meaning.
It's similar for me! My kid loves those size comparison videos and when they compare the size of planets and stars, and it suddenly zooms out to show an even BIGGER one, and then there's a quarter of another one coming into view on the edge of the screen, only to dwarf the already huge one, and it zooms out again... it makes me feel veeery funny.
Well, I made a sci fi setting where born spacers basically all developed a sort of claustrophobia toward gravity wells. I wasn't sure whether to keep it because it's directly verifiable as true or false, even if really difficult. But it feels like the kind of side effect that happens when you radically change the environment humans live in.
I learnt this fear playing a PC game Frontier - Elite II. In your spaceship you could fuel scoop from gas giants, but if you let your velocity drop too low, you would not be able to escape the gravity well and then you were on a one way trip to the core.
Yup, I feel the same way whenever the ‘what would happen if a minuscule black hole barely touched our orbit’ videos. Because we have absolutely no control whatsoever. The universe is nothing but a fight between order and chaos and we are just along for the ride.
You can actually run these simulations yourself (given you have the computing power!). Many astrophysics codes are open source and can be ran by anyone, particularly smoothed particle hydrodynamics codes that are used in research
Like when you try lsd and your trip sitter says “anything you do, don’t look at yourself in the mirror”, and there you find yourself just staring at that mirror. It’s kind of scary but mesmerizing at the same time to me.
I don't know if there's a video of it, but it's very easy to picture, since you're just falling through clouds until you reach the liquid gradient, then you're falling through thicker clouds until you realize it's actually liquid now. If you were somehow still alive to this point, and there's no reason to assume you would be, as the temperatures are pretty close to the surface of the sun already at the gradient and actually surpass the heat of the surface of the sun just below, and the liquid you're dipping into is also liquid hydrogen... At some point you would reach the core gradient. There is no known solid layer, just a massive liquid core, as far as we've been able to tell. Anywhere that could be a solid is too hot to be a solid, and there are no firm boundaries between any level, all gradients of increasing heat and pressure. The core is liquid stone and then metal, progressing inward. My favorite layer is the first layer the is counted as the core. It's where the liquid hydrogen you were in grades into metallic liquid hydrogen, which would probably finally arrest your fall, as it's the most rapid transition to the best of my knowledge. Except would it really arrest your fall? I mean, aside from shattering your already compressed to the size of a teapot body, probably not. Since now you're in the core, so the gravity is especially strong, and fluctuating around you. You'd probably be pulled all manner of directions by the electric waves of metallic hydrogen. The death would have been miles up, hours ago... Maybe even just in the ammonia layer at the very outermost edge of the atmosphere. But if you were alive, it would be like being on a liquid hot plate pulsing with visible electricity.
So that's what I wanted to make sure I've got right:
The Earth was molten/liquid
Theia was solid
Hitting molten Earth liquefied Theia
Is that right?
Watching it, I'm still not sure if Theia was also potentially liquid, or if the Earth was solid but that the impact of Theia on Earth was so powerful the the energy liquefied both?
As far as we can tell, Theia was solid. Earth was also somewhat solid, about as much as today. The collision carried so much energy that they were both liquidified, and eventually re-solidified.
I’m a geologist and the amount of “no fucking way that actually happened” my brain just experienced watching that when I know it to be true makes me feel very weird.
You're thinking of the Earth in the animation as "our planet" when in reality this was during a time of countless pieces of orbiting debris and chunks crashing into everything and one another. The planets weren't formed yet. This is how they formed. This was just one of the many many many things that happened to result in our specific solar system.
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u/destructopop 7h ago
I love this simulation. I makes me deeply uncomfortable in a weird way. Not because of a future concern, but the memory that our planet was once jiggly molten chaos after a collision with a similarly sized body. I studied astrophysics... I rationally know this. But seeing it makes my tummy feel bad. Love it.
It's kinda like the visualisation of what would happen to a small object (like a human) passing through the atmosphere of Jupiter towards the core... The compression as you pass through thicker and thicker layers of matter and closer to the center of gravity. I picture it more often than most, because it makes me feel icky and I'm grim I guess.