What If the Sun Vanished Right Now?

If the Sun vanished this very second, nobody on Earth would know. Not for eight minutes and twenty seconds. Then the sky would simply switch off. What follows is real physics: the Moon goes dark about a second later, the Earth flies off in a straight line, the stars come out at noon, and at first the planet loses about twenty degrees a day. But in 1977, a tiny submarine found life in water no sunlight had ever reached. A star can't simply vanish, so that's our one piece of make-believe. Everything after it is real, and sourced below. Sources Live Science, "What would happen to Earth if the sun suddenly vanished?" (Timothy Cronin, MIT; Michael Summers, George Mason University) NASA: Sun facts; the Earth and Moon fact sheets (light travel time, orbital speed, distances) LIGO/Virgo, GW170817: gravitational waves and light from two merging neutron stars arrived 1.7 s apart (Abbott et al., ApJ Letters 848, 2017) Corliss et al., Science 203 (1979): "Submarine thermal springs on the Galápagos Rift" NPR, "The Deep-Sea Find That Changed Biology" (2011) Chapelle et al., Nature 415 (2002): a subsurface microbial community that runs on geothermal hydrogen Orkustofnun (the National Energy Authority of Iceland): geothermal heating of homes US EIA, "Fossil fuels"; standard phase data for nitrogen and oxygen Art: every shot is drawn for this video. No real logos, no film characters. #whatif #space #sun