If the sun disappeared would we all die? What would happen, what would the timeline be?

Question

Assume disappeared magically - since I'm sure there's complications involved in supernovas and stuff. If we woke up one day and it just wasn't there.

What's with the random vitriol YoPo - does your wife beat you?

Answer 1

If it wasn't there?

Well, you probably wouldn't wake up. Life as we know it would be completely destroyed rather quickly.


Due to the fact gravity propagates at light speed, the sun would appear to still be in the sky for awhile. After a few minutes, it would become pitch dark and there would no longer be any graviational force pulling the earth around the sun.


It's kind of hard to imagine what would happen here. The earth would go flying off into space, for sure. The moons gravitation field could be disrupted, and people would probably be thrown around a bit but ok.

It would become incredibly cold in only a matter of hours. You would not last very long at all, and if you were sleeping you probably wouldn't wake up.

Answer 2

Leaving aside the "supernovas and stuff" and also the gravitation as we are taking a fantastic trip to "the world without a sun"... there wouldn't be much to contemplate, total darkness, sub-freezing temperatures, chaos, panic, violence. All plants would die and so the first link of the food chain would disappear breaking the balance, animals would die, if they could resist the cold. Not a pleasant sight, but fortunately this is fantasy...

Answer 3

It would be a 'bad' day, that's for sure...

1. The earth would stop being in orbit and then head off in a straight line from the moment the Sun disappeared.

2. With no Sun, there is zero heating of the earth. Thus, from that magical moment, the earth would start to cool. Within a day, the temperature would approach that of space. Oceans would freeze. All weather would stop.

3. In spite of running our power plants at maximum capability, and heating as much as possible, we'd be dead in a week.

not a good day at all.

Answer 4

Basically, the Earth would be plunged into eternal night. It would freeze, getting colder and colder until within a few weeks or months I would think the oceans would all freeze. There is some heat in the Earth's core, which might prevent the atmosphere from liquefying and freezing, but I don't know for sure if the hear from the core would escape fast enough.

Answer 5

The Earth would instantly, by its own momentum, be flung off into space. We would see the light from the sun during the 8.3 minutes it takes for it to get to us, and for a short while we might not even realize what had happened. But then all life would almost certainly die off within minutes, I think.

Answer 6

* just an idea * im sure there would me a massive ice age that would last forever....... if we didnt build things underground intime we would all perish. Because Figurativly speaking the conditions above ground would be too rugged. We would have to have huge amounts of electricity to sustain life underground to supply light, water, basically our life would revolve around electricity. It would be hard to have a stable government, and would be Very chaotic untill some hugely popular polititian got everything in line..... life underground would be fun!!

Answer 7

Time line is a little less than 12 hours. I predict the sun will disappear at sunset!

Answer 8

The earth would roar off at a tangent and we would all kick off in a very short time.

Answer 9

Yes to question one.
If it blew up, like a super nova, I wouldn't have time to comlpete this sente

Answer 10

Yes, would eventually die off.....we need natural sunlight for survival....