2 ms·
Ha! Thanks for running through the numbers, very interesting. The air in that 15 mile ball is almost transparent to infrared, though, so I'd probably assume tha
by ericd 9y ago
Ha! Thanks for running through the numbers, very interesting. The air in that 15 mile ball is almost transparent to infrared, though, so I'd probably assume that the surface area of the sphere would receive the lion's share, rather than the volume within it. So the energy delivered should fall off roughly with the square of the radius rather than the cube. Might be enough to give a sunburn, if nothing else.
Edit: On my phone I'm getting ~5.8 joules per square meter. Google seems to be mangling the units, though, so I can't be sure it's not dropping or adding in a factor of 1,000, though.
Edit 2: assuming that figure is correct, unless it's released in <1/200 of a second, it's not competitive with the sun at the equator (>1,000 Watts/Joules per m^2 per second)
- btilly 9y agoI think that there are some decimal places missing. But that said, I'd expect a chemical explosion to deliver itself mostly as a shockwave and a ball of hot gas, with relatively little delivered by light. Because the part exploding is surrounded by smoke and chemicals that absorb light.
- ericd 9y agoYeah, I was going for worst case assumptions, where all of the energy turned into infrared, which is definitely not going to be the case. Here's the math, if you want to double check: (10 x 4.184 x (10^9 joules))/(4 x pi x (24000 meters)^2)
- fpoling 9y agoAtmosphere is only transparent to infrared in 7-13 mkm window. Yet I expect the fireball to producing heat at above 500 C that gives peak of radiation below 4 mkm.
- ericd 9y agoThanks, good to know. I was going for worst case calculations, assuming complete transparency. Even that doesn't seem bad.