this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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ELI5
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Explain it to me like I am 5. Everybody should know what this is about.
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I'm not a physicist but I'll give it a try...
Assuming you transported it into Earth's atmosphere at a height of 20 kilometers, it would weigh 10 x 10^18 kilograms and accelerate towards the Earth at 9.8 m/s/s (the force of gravity on Earth) which would strike the Earth with 9.8 x 10^18 Newtons of force or about 1 trillion megatons. For reference, the largest thermo-nuclear man-made explosion was the Tsar-Bomba which was a 50-58 megaton explosion. It would result in a crater that's about 120 kilometers in diameter. For reference, the crater that killed the dinosaurs is 150 kilometers in diameter.
The higher up in the atmosphere you dropped it, the more devastating it would be. I don't think you can really consider it to be "atmosphere" much after about 80 kilometers. At 80 km the impact crater would be around 180 kilometers in diameter.
Basically, It would be extremely devastating to life on Earth and probably cause a mass extinction event similar to the dinosaurs.
I dunno if all my math was correct there, but it was fun to try to figure it out.
You're forgetting a key thing here - a neutron star is held together by its gravity. Take a chunk of it away from that, and it will start to expand.
Yeah I hadn't taken that into account at all. I'm just assuming that it stays roughly teaspoon sized the entire time.