The Calculations Conclave

[Guest MarvelFan15]

How much more energy does it take to blow up the sun than it does Earth?

 

How fast would Superman have to be flying in order to shatter Jupiter's moon Io?

 

At what multiple of c would it take to traverse the Milky Way in 3 hours?

 

We all (read: me) ask these question every day. What links them together, other than the inherent awesomeness that finding the answer to each of them entails?

 

Math, of course. Unfortunately, some of us are more qualified than others. But we shan't let that bog us down. We are a community, after all, and here's a chance for the more mathematically able of us to lend a helping hand to others when they need something quantified: The Calculations Conclave.

 

In this thread, for those of you who remain in the dark about math or are too lazy, post any questions you have concerning the quantification of a feat you'd like sorted out. For those of you who really like to answer questions using math, feel free to respond to anyone and everyone who asks for assistance.

 

Enjoy.

[AVP vs The Terminator]

 

How strong is this man?

[Guest sirmethos]

"How much more energy does it take to blow up the sun than it does Earth?"

 

A ballpark estimate, based on the difference in mass between the Earth and the Sun: You need 999 x 10^36 Joules of energy to blow up the sun.

 

That is 333.000 times more than it would take to blow up the Earth.

 

 

"How fast would Superman have to be flying in order to shatter Jupiter's moon Io?"

 

Io has a mass that is 0,015 times that of Earth.

 

In order to answer that, you need to know Superman's approximate mass.

 

 

"At what multiple of c would it take to traverse the Milky Way in 3 hours?"

 

I could almost do that one at the top of my head. I needed to use a notebook document.

 

292.000.000 times the speed of light, to travel across the entire Milky Way galaxy, in 3 hours.

[Guest Dinsdale Piranha]

I'll try to find the link later, but there's a guy on line who has posted an "asteroid destruction" program. Just punch in the mass of your asteroid, planet, moon, etc and say whether it's made of something more like ice, granite, or iron-nickle ore and it tells you the level of energy you need to split, shatter or vaporize it.

[Indolent]

Methos I don't mean to nitpick but if you're going to make numerical figures that has zeros where you use periods in place of commas, can you use the latter instead of the former?

 

Makes me (and I'm sure others too) do a double take to be sure and sometimes even then...

 

But this is a fun thread!

[Guest MarvelFan15]

Just so everyone knows, my questions above were rhetorical. -.-

 

EDIT:

 

Although...

 

"How much more energy does it take to blow up the sun than it does Earth?"

 

A ballpark estimate, based on the difference in mass between the Earth and the Sun: You need 999 x 10^36 Joules of energy to blow up the sun.

 

That is 333.000 times more than it would take to blow up the Earth.

 

I've read estimates/calculations that suggest much more energy is needed. Orders of magnitude more, in fact. I can't remember where I first saw them, though.

[Guest sirmethos]

"Just so everyone knows, my questions above were rhetorical. -.-"

 

I know, but it was amusing to try to answer them anyway.

 

 

"I've read estimates/calculations that suggest much more energy is needed. Orders of magnitude more, in fact. I can't remember where I first saw them, though."

 

To blow up the Sun? I'd say the estimates were off then.

 

The physics are a bit iffy, but you'd actually need less than my ballpark figure, I just couldn't be arsed doing the physics calculations for it as well, hence just going with the amount of mass. You wouldn't actually need to "blow up" the mass of the Sun, you'd just need to remove enough, to disrupt the processes in the Sun itself, to cause it to explode on it's own.

[Guest force_echo]

How much energy does it take to blow up the Sun? 2 *10^41 J

[Guest Dinsdale Piranha]

There's a great resource for questions like this called Wolfram Alpha.

 

I asked "what is the mass of the sun?" it said: 1.988435×10^30 kilograms

I asked "what is the mass of the earth?" it said: 5.9721986×10^24 kilograms

I had it divide the mass of the sun by the mass of the earth and it gave me Methos' answer but with a lot more detail: 332948.57274170353276597332178471091031701457483346250

[Guest force_echo]

Except you don't just divide the masses. The energy needed to "blow" something up is how much gravitational force every atom is attracting each other with. The relationship isn't linear, Fg= (GM1M2)/R2. Integrating from R1 to R2 as W=FD, we get gravitational potential energy equals U= -(GM1M2)/R. you need to find the limit as R approaches infinity to figure out the amount of energy required to blow something up. So it's not as simple as just dividing the Sun's mass by Earth's mass.

[Guest sirmethos]

Aye. And I already addressed that.

[Guest force_echo]

How? How did you come up with 999*10^36, because that number is thousands of times less than what it should be.

[Guest Incredible Hulk]

Well here's a question for yah.

It known that the maximum amount of punches a Machamp (Pokemon) can throw in a few seconds is approximately one thousand.

 

How fast would a Machamp's fists have to be going, compared to a human, to accomplish this? I was reading this and wondering how much of a speed feat this actually was. You would have to of course factor in a Machamp having 4 arms. Also let's say a few seconds is equal to 3 or 4 seconds. At each 3 and 4 seconds how fast would Machamp's fists be going?

 

Also what how much does the average mountain weigh (whether it be in comics or real life) because it is said in the pokedex or something that Machamp can move a mountain with one hand which I thought was impressive.

[Guest Ruinus]

Boom Table tells you alot of the "how much do I need to blow up a planet?" numbers.

 

And here is the Astroid Desctruction Calculator from stardestroyer.net

[G4hardcore]

 

How strong is this man?

Half a black hole? -.- Isn't that like saying 50% of infinity? Black holes have infinite mass, and gravity is proportional to an object's mass. Mind you, black holes can have a differing ranges, but at the end of the day, nothing escapes the event horizon. But hey, comics and such.

[Guest force_echo]

Half a black hole? -.- Isn't that like saying 50% of infinity? Black holes have infinite mass, and gravity is proportional to an object's mass. Mind you, black holes can have a differing ranges, but at the end of the day, nothing escapes the event horizon. But hey, comics and such.

Black Holes most definitely do not have infinite mass.

[Guest Ruinus]

Black holes have infinite density, maybe that's what he meant?

[Guest Dinsdale Piranha]

Half the pull of a black hole is a little vague. Black holes come in many sizes and levels of power.

[Guest Dinsdale Piranha]

Well here's a question for yah.

It known that the maximum amount of punches a Machamp (Pokemon) can throw in a few seconds is approximately one thousand.

 

How fast would a Machamp's fists have to be going, compared to a human, to accomplish this? I was reading this and wondering how much of a speed feat this actually was. You would have to of course factor in a Machamp having 4 arms. Also let's say a few seconds is equal to 3 or 4 seconds. At each 3 and 4 seconds how fast would Machamp's fists be going?

 

This will be crude, but... According to the net, the record for punches is 7/second.

 

If Machamp is doing 1000 punches in 4 seconds that's 250 punches per second. Since the Machamp has twice as many arms as a human, we can divide by 2 to get an equivalent. That's 125 punches per second per pair of hands.

 

125/7 = 17.86 so the Machamp is about 18 times as fast as the fastest human puncher.

 

 

Also what how much does the average mountain weigh (whether it be in comics or real life) because it is said in the pokedex or something that Machamp can move a mountain with one hand which I thought was impressive.

 

There's no such thing as an average mountain. We'd need to know what mountain a Machamp had actually moved. Here is a discussion of the weight of Mt. Fuji.

[Guest Dinsdale Piranha]

How much more energy does it take to blow up the sun than it does Earth?

 

 

There's a table here.

 

How fast would Superman have to be flying in order to shatter Jupiter's moon Io?

 

I think someone got this already.

 

At what multiple of c would it take to traverse the Milky Way in 3 hours?

 

The Milky Way is 100364 light years in diameter. In other words, it would take light 8.798×10^8 hours to cross it. Divide that by 3 and you find that Superman would have to be travelling 293,266,667 times lightspeed.

[Guest shellsbut]

2.24 x 10^32 j for earth (over comming gravitational binding energy)

 

then like Sirmethos said logically times it by roughly 330 000

 

7.4592 x 10^37 j for the sun

[Guest Ruinus]

The page Dinsdale Piranha linked says 2.30E+48 J for the Sun.

[Guest force_echo]

2.24 x 10^32 j for earth (over comming gravitational binding energy)

 

then like Sirmethos said logically times it by roughly 330 000

 

7.4592 x 10^37 j for the sun

Except like I already said, that's not how the math works.

[G4hardcore]

Black holes have infinite density, maybe that's what he meant?

There we go, thanks.

[C.T.]

 

How fast is Hawkeye moving?