Useless Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about how one can tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare. Pay attention on Apple, Spotify or on our podcast web page.

By the tip of the sixteenth century, just about everybody knew that Earth revolved across the solar, and never the opposite means round. This was a serious blow to those that thought Earth was the centre of the universe, however the Useless Planets Society is right here to alleviate their dismay. That’s proper, we’re bringing again geocentrism.

Really making Earth the centre of our photo voltaic system goes to take extra than simply fudging the maths. The solar is a lot extra huge than our puny planet that it’s practically inconceivable to drive the previous to orbit the latter, so our hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane are going to need to make some main adjustments to the photo voltaic system as we all know it.

They’re joined for this episode by Andy Rivkin at Johns Hopkins College in Maryland, who says that the one solution to create a geocentric photo voltaic system is to make Earth essentially the most huge factor round. Assuming that doesn’t drive the planet to break down right into a black gap, this may result in some unusual results.

For one, the moon goes to have to hurry as much as stay in orbit, circling Earth each hour or so till it merely shatters. The remainder of the planets would pace up, too, or else they are going to all smash into the brand new huge Earth inside a decade or two. All that additional mass in our planet might even disturb different close by stars and begin to pull them in direction of us. The triumphant geocentric photo voltaic system may not final lengthy, however it could definitely have a dramatic finish.