Specifically, what would happen to all the bodies that orbit the sun, if it disappeared into itself?
I know it has to do with the nature of the blink out, how gravity is used, but I’m thinking of the specific case of, if the major gravity source in the solar system disappeared, how would everything else react? Would it mash up into and around mega-Jupiter? Would the Oort cloud, um, drift away? Would it exert collective force and “reshape” the inner system?
Not being the the most well versed in physics by a long shot. But my best guess is that all orbitting bodies would be flung outwards in space.
Newton would still hold. We would still have the inertia of their old orbits. Without a sun though they would proceed in straightlines, perpendicular to the sun at tangents of our old orbits. Flying into the inky blackness of space.
The fastest orbitting planetary bodies would travel the fastest outward, most of which being inner planets, some collisions could be possible. As they would lap the outer planets.
Inner planets would also likely collide past through the asteroid belt for better or worse. It would be tangenting outward too, but much more slowly than the inner planets Id guess. But maybe not? The small masses their might mean they would fly out faster.
Ive got no idea if the various moons would continue to orbit around their planets or not. It likely might depend on the tangent they are ejected from the sun’s gravity on relative to their parent planet’s tangent. Moons though could collide with planets too then though.
I remember reading a lot of speculation once that Jupiter was a gas giant who had failed to reach enough mass to ignite into a star. Depending on the collisions to it, it would be interesting if it got enough mass to ignite. Though I don’t know what that suffecient mass would be.
It’s also massive enough id guess it could catch a few things with it’s gravity that were lobbed at it. But whether or not it would grab a particular planet would be dependent on it’s “ejection tangent” and how close it brought it to jupiter, and if the planet was travelling fast enough to resist it’s gravity.
The sun suddenly dissapearing is something I thought about a lot as a kid.
I always love the idea of “cosmic billiards”, whether its literal space billiards in Red Dwarf, or gravity-bending waves in Star Trek: Generations.
In that vein, I imagined blinking out the sun at just the right moment to launch Mercury at the asteroid field to " pepper Saturn at an angle that adds enough mass while igniting Jupiter!
Story seed to play with. 