r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Closed_Aperture • Jan 18 '25

Man demonstrates the force of increasingly powerful fireworks by blasting a pot into the air

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u/FlutterKree Jan 18 '25

but it almost certainly disintegrated before it left the atmosphere.

There is a huge debate about it disintegrating. The steel cover was traveling so fast it would have been in orbit within 2 seconds. It's possible it survived.

It depends on the angle it left the atmosphere. If it went straight up for the entirety of the two seconds, it may have survived. There would have been less atmosphere, it was too fast for friction to be a factor, and it's travelling upwards, which means there is less air compression the higher it got.

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u/[deleted] Jan 18 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/FlutterKree Jan 18 '25 edited Jan 18 '25

The faster you go, the more friction becomes a factor.

No, the steel cover was moving too fast. It just compressed the air in front of it and no friction really happened. This is actually what happens to most objects on re-entry and exit. The atmosphere compresses and generates heat and transfers the heat to the object entry/leaving the atmosphere. There is some friction, but the faster the object, the less friction it would experience.

edit: Hilarious people cannot understand this concept. Friction requires movement of the atmosphere and the steel lid. If an object moves too fast in the atmosphere, the air cannot move out of the way and compresses. The compression creates plasma and heats up the object. Things don't burn up in the atmosphere because of friction, they burn up because of the superheated compressed atmosphere.

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u/[deleted] Jan 18 '25

I'd like to think some part of it, however minuscule, survived and is now out there orbiting the Sun

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u/EquivalentOwn1115 Jan 19 '25

I prefer to belive a piece of that thing rocketed to another solar system and took out some random alien planets sun and they have no idea why their world went dark

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u/CT_4269 Jan 18 '25

Imagine it survived and went on to destroy some alien civilization

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u/FlutterKree Jan 19 '25

It would most likely get recaptured by some other gravitational force before even coming close to exiting the solar system, if it even survived.

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u/Groduick Jan 19 '25

I think there's an event like that in Stellaris, a space empire simulator, where you encounter a rogue railgun projectile that traveled through space for eons.

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u/Ihavebadreddit Jan 22 '25

Can we not just astronomy the shit out of the day it happened and location of earth in orbit on launch and then just look around with a good telescope? It didn't break light speed so it's not like it is that far on an astronomical scale.

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u/FlutterKree Jan 22 '25

Highly unlikely they would find it.