If gravity is what holding the planet together. How did gravity came to be in the first place? Can we visualise gravity? Can gravity be increased or decreased? If a planet is destroyed into chunks, will gravity holds the broken planet together?
In: 0
Not a physicist so anyone else correct me if I’m wrong.
Anyway, as far as we can tell, gravity appears to be just a fundamental fact of reality. Anything with mass imparts a curvature on spacetime (whole other ELI5 can of worms there) and the result is that masses tend to get pulled together. Whoever figures out why certain universal constants exist can sit on top of their pile of Nobel prizes.
We can visualize gravity often by reducing reality down to two dimensions in a diagram.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matjaz-Vidmar/publication/332442180/figure/fig1/AS:748270787784704@1555413066027/Gravity-Field-Diagram-and-Gateway-Earth-Space-Access-Architecture-C-Gateway-Earth.jpg
The topic of that diagram is something else but can you see how the earth and moon create a depression in the space around? That’s effectively what’s happening, except the “plane” of space there is 3d in reality instead of 2d there.
If a planet were to go kablooey like Alderaan in Star Wars, it all depends on the power of the explosion. If it’s strong enough to send most or all of the pieces away at faster than escape velocity*, the planet’s gone forever. They may or may not end up creating an asteroid belt around the planet’s sun. But if it were just barely enough to break up the planet, the pieces might fly around and collide with each other for a bit before eventually settling back into place, in a wildly different configuration than they were at first.
Good luck in your further research. 🙂
*I mentioned escape velocity up there, and I suppose the actual value would be less than the intact planet because of the distance between the parts after the initial explosion. But up to a certain point the debris field could be considered to have a single barycenter with its own escape velocity before the sun or other bodies became more important in the calculation.
Latest Answers