0681: "Gravity Wells"

[jimbo1981]

What's the number quoted under the Earth (5478 km) in the poster?
The height of Earth's gravity well is it's radius, by definition (6379 km).

[jetsam]

He put in The Sirens of Titan!

[armandoalvarez]

I went to the XKCD store and saw the poster for this comic. So I started looking at the comic again for the first time in years, and saw the text that "If you dropped a few dozen more Jupiters into Jupiter, the pressure would ignite fusion and make it a star."
To me, this would be an awesome "What if?"
Obviously the results would be disastrous for the rest of the solar system, but does anyone have any guess about the details? What kind of star would it become? How would its orbit with the sun change? What would happen to the orbits of the other planets in between? Would some far distance rock, say Pluto or one of the moons of Neptune, become as warm as the earth?

[VanI]

I went to the XKCD store and saw the poster for this comic. So I started looking at the comic again for the first time in years, and saw the text that "If you dropped a few dozen more Jupiters into Jupiter, the pressure would ignite fusion and make it a star."
To me, this would be an awesome "What if?"

mailto:whatif@xkcd.com

[bmonk]

I went to the XKCD store and saw the poster for this comic. So I started looking at the comic again for the first time in years, and saw the text that "If you dropped a few dozen more Jupiters into Jupiter, the pressure would ignite fusion and make it a star."
To me, this would be an awesome "What if?"
Obviously the results would be disastrous for the rest of the solar system, but does anyone have any guess about the details? What kind of star would it become? How would its orbit with the sun change? What would happen to the orbits of the other planets in between? Would some far distance rock, say Pluto or one of the moons of Neptune, become as warm as the earth?

I know how it would end:
If you dropped in enough additional matter, you could make it a supernova explosion.

[rmsgrey]

I went to the XKCD store and saw the poster for this comic. So I started looking at the comic again for the first time in years, and saw the text that "If you dropped a few dozen more Jupiters into Jupiter, the pressure would ignite fusion and make it a star."
To me, this would be an awesome "What if?"
Obviously the results would be disastrous for the rest of the solar system, but does anyone have any guess about the details? What kind of star would it become? How would its orbit with the sun change? What would happen to the orbits of the other planets in between? Would some far distance rock, say Pluto or one of the moons of Neptune, become as warm as the earth?

I know how it would end:
If you dropped in enough additional matter, you could make it a supernova explosion.

If you dropped in enough additional matter quickly enough, you could make a black hole. Keep dropping more in and you can get a black hole with an event horizon the size of the universe...