Didja know?...#3

Disclaimer: This issue of "Didja Know?" is rife with silliness and in no way reflects my personal wishes or political beliefs. :)

This issue of "Didja know?" stems from the talk I was giving about gravity in "Lesson #2".

Didja know 1 gram of mass has alot of energy inside it?

E=mc^2
Energy = mass x speed of light squared

so...1 gram of matter (A small paperclip):
E = (1 g) x (2.998 x 10^8 m/s^2)
E = 8.988 x 10^16 gxm^2/s^2

Convert to kg:
E = 8.988 x 10^13 kgxm^2/s^2

Convert to Joules:
E = 8.988 x 10^13 J

1 Joule is about the amount of energy to lift a cheeseburger to your mouth. This means you could use this energy to lift a cheeseburger to your mouth 90 trillion times...

Thats alot of cheeseburgers....

In addition:
1 Megaton nuclear weapon = 4.18 x 10^15 J
This equals about a million tons of TNT...i.e. BIG BOOM.

So a 1 megaton weapon will have the same amount of energy as converting 46.5 grams of matter into pure energy (I think thats right...I'm starting to get confused with all these numbers :)).

1 megaton will destroy about 80 square miles of land.
There are 10555 square miles in massachusetts.

So: 131.9375 megaton bombs. 6135 grams...
[size=24]So a little over 7 kilograms of mass to blow up...Mass. (Remember thats converting that mass directly into energy)[/size]

[color=red]Thats about 13 and a half pounds. [/color]

I found the perfect thing to use....I found it on eeeEEEEEEEBBBBAAAaaaaAYYYYY!

...a bowling ball...
[img]http://i22.ebayimg.com/05/i/06/cb/e5/06_2.JPG[/img]

Now lets see what kind of punishment the entire earth could take:
57,500,000 square miles on earth.

We'll need the equivalent of 718,750 megaton weapons...or 33,421,875 grams....33,421 Kilograms of mass...
Thats one of these:
[img]http://img.alibaba.com/photo/50318672/Bulldozer.jpg[/img]

Mind you, thats surface area...to take out the entire planet and reduce it into rubble? I'm not even gonna post all that math....
[url]http://qntm.org/data[/url]

And in case you really do feel a need to destroy the earth:
[url]http://qntm.org/destroy[/url]

Ok, now I'm getting off subject....
How much mass does a star lose before it goes nova?

Our sun has 2.0×10^30 kg of mass.
It loses about 4.5x10^9 kg of mass each second.

It would lose ALL its mass in about 4.4x10^19 seconds. About 15,000,000,000,000 years.

BUT as a sun loses mass, the balance of gravity and outward pushing forces begins to change inside causing the sun to expand or shrink depend on where it is in its life cycle.
In only about 5,000,000,000 years, the sun will become a red giant then ultimately a white dwarf and planetary nebula.

This is our sun. The suns that tend to form black holes are larger. Usually having the mass of 3-5 of our suns.

The point:
Yes, a sun loses LOTS of mass over its lifetime, but compared to how much mass it started with...its nothing....