Article 6ZYHP What Would Happen If the Earth Were Made of Protons and the Moon Were Made of Electrons

What Would Happen If the Earth Were Made of Protons and the Moon Were Made of Electrons

by
Lori Dorn
from Laughing Squid on (#6ZYHP)
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As part of their ongoingWhat If?"series,Randall MunroeofxkcdandHenry ReichofMinutePhysics answered the very specific question about what would happen if the Earth were entirely made of protons and the moon were entirely made of electrons. The long answer is that electron moons cannot orbit proton planets, as the negatively charged electrons would bounce off of one another.

This is, by far, the most destructive What-If scenario to date. You might imagine an electronMoon orbiting a proton Earth,sort of like a gigantic hydrogen atom. ...However, electron moons do not orbit proton planets: if you put two negatively charged electronstogether, they try to fly apart with a forceabout 20 orders of magnitude stronger than the gravity pulling them together.

The shorter answer is that the entire universe would be sucked into a great big black hole.

There's a huge amount of potential energy in this scenario - the energy that we imagined would blast all these electrons apart. That energy warps space and time just like mass does.,,,,Would the attraction of this universe-mass black hole causethe rest of the universe to collapse? Hard to say.

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