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Ransom Riggs
Apocalyptic fact of the day: if our sun went out
by Ransom Riggs - February 12, 2007 - 9:32 AM

image.jpegDon’t worry, it probably won’t — at least, not for another 5 billion years or so. But if it did, a very interesting thing would happen: our atmosphere would freeze, and precipitate out into oxygen and nitrogen snow. (That’s an interesting image: our atmosphere snowing onto us.) In fact, it would look a lot like normal snow, since solid oxygen is clear with a very pale sky-blue color, and solid nitrogen is clear and colorless. Difference is, there would be a lot more of it than we’re used to. For the math stuff, we turn to ask an astronomer:

“How much snow would there be? The earth’s atmosphere has a mass of about 5000 trillion metric tons (this can be estimated using atmospheric pressure, newton’s law Force = Pressure / Area = Mass x Acceleration, and the earth’s gravitational acceleration and the surface area). If we assume that the “snow” formed when the atmosphere freezes has a density comparable to freshly fallen water snow (about 100 kg/m^3), then we can find the depth of the frozen atmosphere: Depth of “Snow” = Atmosphere’s Mass / Density of Snow / Surface Area.”

In plain English, this works out to about 100 meters of snow — more than enough to cover all but the tallest buildings. If our sun went out, (hypothetical) alien visitors who arrived a year or so after the fact would find nothing but an atmosphere-less world covered with icy snow, a blank slate save for the occasional Sears Tower poking out of the tundra. Creeeeepy.

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Comments (8)

  1. Bad for CopperTone; good for Chapstick.

    posted by Sheldon Siegel on 2-12-2007 at 12:02 pm

  2. Chicken Little was right to be worried about the sky falling.

    posted by Andie on 2-12-2007 at 3:46 pm

  3. How funny that today you talk about black holes and the sun going out, we had this discussion in chemistry. And how lucky I was that I had previous mental floss articles to pull from!

    And maybe after our atmosphere turned to snow we could all go sledding off the tallest building; keep your spacesuits and sleds close at hand!

    posted by Ellen on 2-12-2007 at 5:00 pm

  4. Oh Great! My feet get cold when it dips below 70 here at the beach ! :(

    posted by CropTillDawn on 2-12-2007 at 6:10 pm

  5. Yeah, but the odds are the sun will have expanded enough to fry Earth to a crisp before it goes dark so that’s comforting…oh wait…no it’s not…

    posted by megaera on 2-13-2007 at 12:40 am

  6. I am slightly more worried that Paris Hilton makes another movie…

    OH! THE HUMANITY!

    posted by Brucesquatch on 2-29-2008 at 10:48 am

  7. I’m sure we’d have a long drawn out period of planetary cooling before it just clicked off. That might actually be fun, roving bands of canibals and snow boarding anytime you like.

    posted by Jared Probst on 2-29-2008 at 1:16 pm

  8. You can bet the mayor of Chicago would have it cleaned off the streets by morning.

    posted by boliyou on 3-1-2008 at 11:52 am

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