Use Physics to prove Ragnarök has already occurred
This question asks what would happen to the solar system if the sun vanished for about three days, the mass and energy of the sun simply ceasing to exist. This answer (as of this question, anyway) notes that for the most part, the solar system will remain unchanged.
If Ragnarök has already happened, and the sun has already been eaten and replaced, is it possible to use the current eccentricity, positions, and speeds of the various planets in our solar system to determine how long ago that occurred?
As for an explanation of why this is in World Building rather than Physics: The events in Ragnarök result in sentient life on Earth being effectively wiped out; after the cataclysmic event, only two people remain, and civilization restarts through them and their children. There would be no written history of the event, and oral tradition is unreliable at best. There may not even be any archaeological evidence. However, the physics would remain, and "proving" that the sun vanished for three days is a pretty good step towards building a magical, unknown history into a normal, mundane world - through science, no less!
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2646. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Yes, but you'd have to get lucky.
If you want to use celestial bodies, you're best bet would be to study the effects of something that closely interacts with the Sun. Really, this rules out much of the solar system. Even Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, is 46 million kilometers away from the Sun - at its closest approach! The difficulty here is that almost all the bodies in the solar system have orbits with small eccentricities, and are pretty far from the Sun. Fortunately, there are exceptions.
Comets have fairly eccentric orbits, so they're an interesting choice. They can closely interact with a body and then zoom off somewhere else, and we can study the effects that other body had on them based on orbital perturbations. For this, we can look at sungrazing comets. I think these are the coolest bodies in the solar system, partly because of their crazy orbits but also because "sungrazing" has a nice ring to it.
Sungrazing comets swing out from the far reaches of the solar system, coming in extremely close to the Sun - sometimes only a few thousand kilometers away! Think about it - that's one one-thousandth the distance between Mercury and the Sun! How does this help us? Well, think about what happens to these comets when they pass the Sun:
- They may undergo orbital perturbations
- They develop a long tail and related features (although this happens with all comets, this can be fairly prominent on sungrazers)
If the Sun disappeared for three days while a sungrazing comet (let's say a Kreutz sungrazer, because these ones come really close) was near the Sun, the comet wouldn't interact with the Sun. It would continue on its merry way in space. Our best shot at figuring out that the Sun wasn't there for three days would be to trace back the orbits of these comets using a simulator. It would be very hard to accurately model the orbits, but if the comet went straight through the location the Sun was supposed to be in, was otherwise not perturbed, we would know that something odd had happened.
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