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this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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That's amazing, thank you! A ghostly remnant of gravity still exerting 8-ish minutes of influence on earth (in the event of the sun's instantaneous disappearance) is something I never heard or thought about before, but it makes sense. It's hard to visualise it though. Like the earth is a marble circling a drain after plug has been pulled and the water is all but gone. Then the minute it is gone, the marble just keeps going in a straight line 👀
I think it's easier if you imagine space/time like a flat plane that dips depending on how much mass the central object (like the sun for example) has. Earth circles around that dip much like your drain plug analogy. If the sun disappears, it still takes time for that dip to rise back up to a flat surface. That's the speed of gravity.
As soon as space/time begins to flatten beneath the earth, its momentum begins to turn into a straight line, rather than an orbit.
Also for us standing on the sun facing side of Earth when the magic wand was waved would still see the sun shining in the sky for 8 minutes because that light had already left the sun before it blinked out of existence. We on Earth would experience the loss of the Sun's gravitational influence on the planet and the light of the sun at the same moment as both light and gravity travel at the speed of light.