Relativistic object impacts the earth

Question

A familiar trope within science-fiction is that of a large relativistic object hitting a planet such as the earth. This is normally an interstellar spacecraft or a kinetic weapon with a mass in the range 10³ - 10⁶ kg. But what would actually happen?

The two scenarios seem to be: (a) the object creates a kind of conical tunnel through the earth with most of the material exiting on the far side; (b) the object dumps all of its kinetic energy within a few tens or hundreds of kilometres of the impact point and we have the equivalent of a conventional asteroid impact.

Light transit time through an earth diameter of 12,800 km is just over 40 milliseconds. There’s not much time for lateral effects as the object barrels in. So what would happen if a 1 tonne object hit the earth, square on, at 0.99995c (γ = 100)?

Answer 1

I think there would not be a hard collision of the object with the ground. It would pass through a column of air of comparable mass, so I suspect the energy of the object would be consumed before it hits the ground. This would be a sort of massive cosmic ray event. The interaction energy of atoms would be comparable to Tevatron energy (1/10 of that or so) and what would reach the ground would be a huge pulse of secondary particles that generate an enormous thermal-mechanical shock wave. At 10^3kg the energy would be $E~\simeq~\gamma mc^2$ or about $10^{19}J$ of energy. One ton of explosives is 4.18 mega Joules of energy, so the energy released would be about the equivalent of $2\times 10^7$ megatons of explosives. Clearly you would not want to be anywhere near this. However, I suspect the damage done to the Earth’s surface would not be due to the body actually impacting the surface, but from this huge shock front. So one would have to search out what is known about that sort of mechanics.

Answer 2

I think that this question should be considered also as a materials physics question. There will certainly be a very high energy and a momentum hundreds of times greater than a traditional asteroid. The intention of the question is that the material not break up before collision. What happens at and after collision is probably vaporization. I say probably because a massless neutrino object could travel through the Earth. Otherwise the vaporization will happen quickly (nanoseconds), but not instantly. So can a material exist which will fail to vaporize until it has burrowed through the Earth some distance? There are discoveries of non-standard materials like metamaterials, but these as yet would be unsuitable. So it might be a research project to find such a material - or prove that none could exist (a proof which would require a broader theory of matter than available today as it would need to incude Dark Matter theory as well).

Answer 3

The answer depends on whether it's heavy enough to reach the ground. If it's small enough, it will fall apart in air and the result will be an explosion. To compute the size of the explosion use the relativistic energy formula.

Small meteors are slowed down by the air and reach the earth at their terminal velocity. These provide the samples you can buy on eBay. Meteors big enough to keep their natural speed of around 40,000 meters per second (i.e. 10 to 40 miles per second) vaporize on hitting the earth. This is what would happen to a relativistic meteor that was big enough to reach the earth.

To see why large meteors vaporize, note that the speed of sound in air is about 330 meters per second. This is the velocity for nitrogen molecules which have a molecular weight of 28 at say room temperature or around 300 Kelvin. Iron has an atomic weight of around twice that, so its velocity, at the same temperature, is around 0.7 as much (i.e. kinetic energy is given by $mv^2/2$ and the molecules in a gas at a given temperature all have the same average kinetic energy no matter how heavy they are, assuming they're a gas). So a meteor traveling at 40,000 meters per second has kinetic energy per atom of around 200 times the kinetic energy per atom of room temperature air. Thus the vapor produced is on the order of around 200 x 300K = 60,000 K. (Actual temperatures are a lot lower because the heat is spread around over more than just the meteor, the nearby rocks or whatever is also heated, but this gives the general idea.)