Google calculator

I used Google's supercool calculator to estimate the wind resistance force from when I run. It's the same as Google's search interface. It's handly converts from strange units like feet and minutes into MKS. Sadly there are still some things I know in English units instead of metric.

I used it earlier today to figure out how much mass the sun converts into energy. I found that there's 1380 J/sq. meter/second hitting the earth. E-equals-em-cee-squared (for massless particles) so

1380 joules / square meter * 4 / 3 * pi * (1 AU)**2 / (c**2) equals 1.4E9 kilograms or a megaton of matter per second.

The reason I wanted to know was reading the wikipedia article on The Lensman books. "The result is so violent that Nth space planet launched against Ploor's sun makes it go supernova, still radiating the energy of 550 million Suns several years later." That's 1380 joules / square meter * 4 / 3 * pi * (1 AU)**2 / (c**2) * (1 year / second) * 550000000*3 or 7.5E25 kg. You can also think of that as about 10 earth masses annihilated or 1/25000'th of the sun.

I'm probably off by a bit. The energy/sq. m. number might be at the Earth's surface and not in space at Earth orbit. The clouds reflect some energy and the air filters other wavelengths out. I'll assume it's not including the neutrino flux. Probably within a factor of 2-5. Close enough.

If all the energy came from fusion via the proton-proton chain reaction then only 0.7% of the mass can be converted. For Doc Smith's super nutcracker that means nearly 0.2% of the sun fuses per year. Which can't happen because it requires a rare proton->neutrino+positron event. More likely Ploor's sun's atmosphere would have been blown outwards.

Face it Andrew, the Lensman books are not a good source for valid astrophysical information.

I was peeved that Google knows "radius of the earth" but not "earth's orbital radius" or "orbital radius of the earth". I figured out I could use 1 AU instead, but what if I wanted to calculate the solar energy on Mars. Would have have to remember that Mars' orbit is about 1.6 AU? (Okay, 1.5 but I remember this from Bode's Law, which is off a bit for Mars and a lot for Neptune and Pluto. For the Pluto I just remember 40 AU.)