Can planets die of old age
I was wondering if planets die after a certain amount of time, perhaps because of decay?
If this is the case, how do they die and how long does it take?
Do they implode? Explode or perhaps just fall apart?
Incase of any of the causes mentioned above, would this make a sound, a sound is basically a wave travelling through the air, however there is no air in space.
And what if you put TNT inside the middle of the earth? Are you able to explode it then?
And what would happen to all the lava inside planet earth?
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1 answer
Planets can die, but it either takes a lot of energy and effort, or is very boring.
Boring
Planets can just stop working. As stated by some other answers here, if a planet has no life on it and its processes such as the rock cycle and atmospheric phenomena such as weather have stopped, it can be fairly safely considered dead.Interesting
As you can see in this question, you need $2.4 \times 10^{32}$ joules to counter the Earth's gravitational binding energy - if you want to explode it you need a lot more. This kind of energy does not come lightly (it's roughly equivalent to a small asteroid travelling at very close to the speed of light). You'd need to put in a lot of time and effort to 'kill' a planet this way - it would be far easier just to kill all the life on it.
However, the nearby star can deliver this kind of energy more trivially - if it reaches the end of its life and goes supernova, pretty much the entire local solar system will be destroyed.
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