3 ms·
I'd expect not, for 2 reasons. • I can't think offhand of any mechanism by which it would escape in some preferred direction. I'd expect to be pretty much even
by tzs 2y ago
I'd expect not, for 2 reasons.
• I can't think offhand of any mechanism by which it would escape in some preferred direction. I'd expect to be pretty much evenly spread in all directions, so any effects on the orbit of what remains caused by the hydrogen leaving in any particular direction would be cancelled out by the effects of hydrogen leaving in the opposite direction.
• We are talking about 5.6 x 10^12 tons of hydrogen. The mass of the Earth is 5.972 x 10^21 tons. The mass of the hydrogen is about 1 billionth the mass of Earth. That's about the ratio of the mass of a grain of rice to the mass of the International Space Station.
Tossing that small of mass away, even if it was all in one direction, is not going to do anything significant to your orbit unless you tossed it away with very very very high velocity. A naive calculation just using Newtonian mechanics suggests it would have to be much faster than the speed of light to carry enough momentum away to matter. I'll leave it to others to figure out what fraction of the speed of light it would have to be going to have equivalent momentum.
- Someone 2y ago> I can't think offhand of any mechanism by which it would escape in some preferred direction. I think the sun’s heat would give it a slight preference to escape from the sunny side of earth.