Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to causing a gravitational wave apocalypse – and subjects them to the laws of physics to see how they fare. Listen on Apple, Spotify or on our podcast page.
It is time for an epic journey. On the season finale of Dead Planets Society, our hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane are sending Earth on a voyage through the cosmos – and taking the entire solar system along for the ride.
After all, sending Earth across the universe without its home star would result in a dark, cold trip and the demise of all life on the planet. That would render the journey moot, as there would be nobody around to see the wonders of the cosmos, so we will have to take the sun with us. The rest of the planets are simply a bonus.
Obviously, moving the sun is not an easy task, especially if you want to keep the planets orbiting around it. That’s why astrophysicist Jay Farihi at University College London joined this episode to help figure out the problem.
One possibility is to build a colossal warp drive – a self-contained bubble of space-time that moves by warping the space in front of it. But these hypothetical devices are renowned for potentially allowing faster-than-light travel, and the key to keeping all the planets bound to the sun is to move slowly. Plus, we don’t know how to build one.
Another option is to place a black hole just in front of the sun to accelerate it slightly. The black hole would have to be moved along with the sun, or perhaps a string of black holes could pass the solar system along in a cosmic relay race.
These options are particularly unrealistic, but there are more plausible ideas – not doable, but at least more feasible than a solar-system-sized warp drive. These include a set of enormous solar sails, or potentially placing an indestructible straw inside the sun to funnel out its high-pressure insides in a jet of plasma.
There are many places in the universe that our hosts would love to visit with the newly mobile solar system, from stellar clusters to nebulae to a supermassive black hole. All we need is a few technological impossibilities to make it happen.
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