posted on Jul, 8 2011 @ 02:25 AM
Originally posted by fixer1967
Well may be it could. Dwarf star matter is so incredibly dense a teaspoonful of it would weigh many tons. Is it just possible that what fall to Earth
and killed the Dinosaurs was a chunk of dwarf star matter which now sits at our planets core. If it was dense enough it could cause the mass increase
needed for the gravity jump and the chunk could only be a foot across or so.
You may be thinking of neutron star matter. Anyway, here's the problem with your theory. The only reason neutron star matter can get so dense is
that it is inside of the star. The compressive force from the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter causes that huge density. If you
somehow managed to pull an Earth-weighted chunk of matter out of a neutron star, it would no longer have the huge compressive force keeping it in a
small package, and it would basically explode. And even if you somehow managed to stop it from exploding, it would eventually settle into a
"normal" density.
There's an additional problem too. If you really want to double gravity (g = GM/R^2), you'd either have to double mass without significantly
increasing volume (and thus radius), or really increase both by a large amount. So you would want really, really dense elements to come calling.
Interestingly enough, iridium is one of the densest elements (if not the densest), and is connected to the "impact which killed the dinosaurs."
Just for fun, I ran the math on how much iridium it would have taken to double Earth's gravity (assuming no change in gravitational constant G) and
it would have required an addition of 3.28 * 10^24 kg of iridium to the "old Earth", or a chunk of iridium almost twice the diameter of the moon.
(lol.)
Of course, this seems preposterous. However, another possibility to reduce the apparent gravity of the Earth (at least near the Equator) would be if
the Earth had been spinning much faster. We do know that the early Earth MUST have been spinning faster, to conserve angular momentum, since the moon
was closer then. With Earth's current rotational speed, you are currently .034 m/s^2 lighter than at the poles, or only about 0.34%. To feel 50%
lighter at the equator, assuming about the same radius, Earth would have to be spinning about 12 times as fast as it is now, making for about a 2-hour
day!
I could try to calculate just how long ago the Earth might have been spinning that fast, but I fear it would be based on too much speculative
archaeological data. IMO, more concrete evidence for this theory of a faster-spinning Earth reducing apparent weight, would be if there is a
correlation between the size of land creatures and proximity to the equator. Anyone know if there is such a thing?