Impact
When Stars collide
a
stellar hit and run
The events of a white
dwarf colliding with our sun
A collision where one party
collides with another and leaves the
scene is considered to be illegal in the united states. If
a white dwarf would collide with the sun this would be the exact
case. It would take around an hour for the white dwarf to go
completely through the sun and then after causing great distruction and
changing the chemical and physical properities of the sun it would just
continue on its path and leave behind massive distruction.
The first time
a white dwarf and main sequence
collisions were studied it was done by Michael shara, Giora Shaviv and
oded regev at tel aviv university and then technion-israel institute of
technology in haifa. these scientists use supercomputers to study
the effects of various collisions. They concluded that if a sunlike
star was hit by a white dwarf 10 million times as dense, the sunlike
star would be destroyed and only minor warming would take place on the
outside of the white dwarf. If the sun were to go through this type of
collision it would not annilate the earth but would cause all the water
in both the atmosphere and in the oceans to boil away. No
longer
having the gravitational pull of the sun, the earth and other planets
would wonder the galaxy.
Scientific
American
Volume 14, Number 4
Scientific American
Volume 14, Number 4