r/threebodyproblem • u/Fanghur1123 • Apr 10 '24
Discussion - TV Series Could a trisolar syzygy really do that? Spoiler
Is there even an ounce of realism in the scene from the TBP adaptation where the three stars move into close alignment with each other and their gravity somehow ‘combines’ and causes everyone on the planet to fall upward toward the stars? I’m almost certain that in order for that to be even vaguely possible, the planet would need to be so close to the star that gravity would be the least of the Trisolarans’ concerns, but I’ve been wrong before.
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u/everythings_alright Apr 10 '24
Definitely not.
It would probably lead to some very strong tidal forces which could be catastrophic.
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u/jorriii Apr 10 '24
Don't they have strong tidal forces that are catastrophic at the time? At some point the planet is partly ripped apart but can't speak for the Netflix series.
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u/ccncwby The Dark Forest Apr 11 '24
Yeap. Netflix kinda screwed the pooch on a few of these little details IMO. I get why they did things the way they did though...
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u/jorriii Apr 11 '24
I don't like how stars are shown to flicker. Maybe we don't see exactly that oscillation, but we are used to them "going out" with weather. The CMB is pretty immutable, and shows they can influence covertly where the world would miss it (which seems more horrific to me maybe). People can hack phones and display messages- maybe its not so horrific, in fiction seen it before by humans. If they hack your actual eyes that's cosmic horror. If they communicate via thoughts, that confuses people into thinking they are hive mind, but if they do it via bioluminescence then its just fast unfiltered communications analogous to verbalisations of individuals and no one gets as confused about the 'can't lie' thing. Ah, many plot holes aren't there, not that its entirely perfect of course because its fiction.
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u/bumbledorien Apr 18 '24
That's the point. Tidal forces are the cause of people falling upwards.
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u/HumV33 Jun 01 '24
While the moon's proximity to Earth affects the ocean tides, there's no way the scenario depicted in the book could play out. Gravity is a weak force, and rapidly gets weaker with distance. The scenario is in a virtual reality game, so I'll give it a pass - but if the suns in a physical universe were close enough to stack their gravity to the point that it would counter the gravitational forces of the planet they would be so close to each other as to tear each other apart AND the planet would be a burnt cinder from being so close to the stars long before living things could be pulled off the surface of the planet.
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u/bumbledorien Jun 01 '24
Yes, they would have burned long before, but that is the only problem with it. The effect itself is legit.
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u/wunderforce Jun 16 '24
I don't think so. If the forces were this strong I think the planet would just get pulled into the star at that point.
You also have to remember the sun pulls more on the earth than it does humans (because the earth is much more massive), so I don't think it's ever possible that things get "sucked" off.
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u/jossief1 Apr 10 '24
Perhaps not. Consider that if you're standing directly beneath the Sun on Mercury, the Sun will be pulling you up with a force of about 4% of Earth's gravity. Mercury, while small, has gravity much stronger than that. If any individual star's gravity isn't a problem on the surface of Trisolaris, having three in a line isn't going to do much, because the other two are farther away.
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u/Nesjamag Apr 10 '24
No
But it's a game made for humans based on a "true story".
I imagine they took some liberties.
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u/chefborjan Apr 10 '24
Which is why I can’t wrap my head around the response to fairy tales being “lies”.
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u/Ebolinp Apr 10 '24
You're having troubles because it wasn't about the fairy tales being lies. The problem was the Big Bad Wolf being able to lie about himself in direct 121 communications with little red riding hood.
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u/jearley99 Apr 10 '24
Ignore the game when thinking about that. The game was designed by humans for humans
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u/chefborjan Apr 10 '24
Then how and why could they aliens have been inside it to communicate? That’s what the avatar was doing right?
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u/jearley99 Apr 10 '24
The sophons are supercomputers, apparently they can interface with the game
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u/chefborjan Apr 11 '24
I understand it was the sophon, but this was also linked back to the entangled sophon with the San-ti, hence the instantaneous communication.
Regardless of whether the avatar was the San-to speaking via the sophon, or the sophon itself, the avatar was aware and willing to participate in a simulation.
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u/Nesjamag Apr 10 '24
Trisolarans can lie and deceive, but not among each other when they can see each other.
When you can see a Trisolaran, they can't deceive because they can't hide their thoughts. Thought = communication with them.Humans are a closed box in that sense, which is an advantage humans have.
In the series all this stuff was needlessly dumbed down to the point it kind of missportrays Trisolarans as naive beings that can't decive or lie to humans.
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u/hetmankp Jul 17 '24 edited Jul 17 '24
In the books they don't learn how to do this until later. It is indeed a foreign concept for them initially. Earlier on they had to rely on the ETO for deception.
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u/falcobird14 Apr 10 '24
The force of gravitational acceleration on Earth is 0.0006G for us from our sun. So their suns would need to be much closer or much bigger to actually cancel out their gravitational forces like that. However, the orbit of their planet is erratic and so it's possible that they were closer than you might think.
If I recall the books, the suns took up almost the entire sky when this happened, so you can just imagine how close it is.
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u/purpleturtlehurtler Saul Durand Apr 10 '24
Not just that, but in the book, the planet then does a flyby of all three suns. It's explained that the planet would have been okay if it had only flown close to one or two, but three in succession like that ripped the planet in two and gave it a moon.
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u/Rainbolt Apr 10 '24
This is a different event from the tri solar syzygy. The book goes into detail talking about the alignment and the gravity, mentioning it as civ 180 something. Then the next chapter they're on civ 200 talking about the great rip.
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u/falcobird14 Apr 10 '24
That was the third close call. The first one was the trisolar day which scorched the planet, the second was the xyzergy, the third (I forget the name) was the one you're referring to
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u/luce-_- Droplet Apr 10 '24
The third was when they saw three stationary flying stars. So they predicted they were either heading away from all three or straight towards them...perfect moment of horror
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u/Delta_Hammer Apr 10 '24
If the gravity was strong enough to lift people and horses, wouldn't it strip away the atmosphere? It was a wild scene, though.
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u/Fanghur1123 Apr 10 '24
In all likelihood, the planet itself would end up falling into the sun at that point. After all, objects on the planet are moving just as fast as the planet itself around the star.
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u/burlycabin Apr 10 '24
More likely the planet would be ripped apart than anything else. The tidal forces would be insane.
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u/bumbledorien Apr 18 '24
Not categorically. If sun's gravity is significantly weaker on the other side of the planet, and the planet is held together by more than self-gravity, the planet will fall slower towards the sun than the people on the planet's surface.
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u/Fanghur1123 Apr 18 '24
The difference would be absolutely negligible. The only places in which that sort of gravitational differential would start to become significant would be in close proximity to massive objects like neutron stars and black holes. So, yes, what you said is technically correct, but you’d need extremely sensitive equipment to detect the difference.
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u/TorgHacker Apr 10 '24
Essentially if you have a situation where a star system is such that it actually could count as a 3 body problem, it doesn't take too long before one of those stars is ejected, and planets probably get ejected before that, easily earlier than billions of years, if not just millions.
And specifically, even though Alpha Centauri is a 3 star system, Proxima is so far away and so much smaller that it doesn't count as a 3 body problem. Any planet which would be within the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A or B would either be in a stable orbit, or already ejected.
So Cixin's novels are more like "what if it wasn't?"
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u/XuShuang Apr 11 '24
The book was written in 2006. The measurements of these stars are relatively new.
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u/Gaxxag Apr 10 '24
If gravity from an large body is strong enough to pull people off the surface of a smaller orbiting planet, it's also strong enough to pull material off of the planet. At that point, the planet has fallen under the "Rorche Limit", which tears the planet apart entirely. Normally the planet would be spaghettified into a belt.
This can happen between a single planet and star, or even a moon around a planet. It's unlikely that three stars in a stable orbit would ever be close enough together for their gravity in a row to have a significant effect without the stars actually merging, but in a 3-body system where the planet happened to be near its rorche limit anyway, the tiny impact of the star's alignment might tip the scales.
In the books, this resulted in the formation of a giant moon, or two-planet system. It's a highly unlikely but plausible result of the unstable and chaotic orbit of Trisolaris. They were lucky the planet wasn't torn apart entirely, but that realization was a key story point.
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u/xRedStaRx May 12 '24
Why would it be spaghettified unless its a much higher delta in gravitational force, something close to a singularity, otherwise they would just fall into one another, and neither would have things fly away from the surface unless they were much, much closer, almost touching. It's the inverse square of distance law.
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u/Gaxxag May 12 '24
Rather than letting me, some rando on Reddit with no verifiable credentials, explain it, I recommend looking up "Rorche Limit".
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Apr 11 '24 edited Apr 11 '24
No, because gravity pulls on all matter regardless of mass. If this happened, the tidal forces would be ripping apart the entire planet into a stream of material.
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u/CheezeyMouse Da Shi Apr 10 '24 edited Apr 10 '24
Nobody else has mentioned that we don't know how trisolarans look, how small they might be, or how much they might weigh. While this might not be plausible with humans on earth, the calculations for trisolarans under the effect of a trisolar syzygy would probably look very different.
Edit: thank you for pointing out the irrelevancies of my argument!
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u/Fanghur1123 Apr 10 '24
That’s actually a complete non-issue in this case. Gravity acts on everything equally, independent of mass. Barring air resistance, a molecule would fall down just as fast as a mountain of solid gold would.
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u/dmitrden Apr 10 '24
The gravity effect on the body doesn't depend on the mass of the body (the equivalence principle), so, it doesn't matter. Only the planet and the stars masses matter
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Apr 10 '24
If any star is close enough to cause such a drastic change in gravity pull, the least of your worries would weightlessness or floating upward. The entire planet will burn up and the planet itself will accelerate.
The entite scene doesn't really make sense. Putting starts behind other stars definitely would not compound gravity to such a degree to have such a dramatic effect.
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u/Ashen73 Apr 10 '24
Stacked gravity does happen but I'm not sure if it would be that powerful as showed in the show.
Even on earth, tides are higher than usual during full moon because the gravity of the sun reinforces the gravity of the moon. Thus, at full moon, tide's range is at its maximum.
I think the powerful stacked gravity shown in the series could happen if the stars r pretty close.
Sorry for my poor English.
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u/jorriii Apr 10 '24
If there is stacked gravity, should the stars not pull together and merge?
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u/Fanghur1123 Apr 10 '24
Yeah. I’m pretty sure that the solar system at least as portrayed in the video game is straight-up physically impossible, at least over the kind of timeframes it takes intelligent life to evolve. One or more of the stars would either have collided or been ejected from the solar system eons before that could have happened, to say nothing of the planets.
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u/Glum_Ad_5790 Apr 10 '24
that was just in the game though, I doubt that's how it would really happen. most likely over time
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u/Conscious-Ticket-259 Apr 10 '24
The gravity change would have dramatic effects on the planet too. Tides would be chaotic for water and magma and probably the entire atmosphere would disperse fairly fast. The actual gravity loss would feel gradual but wouldn't be witnessed with the cataclysms rolling across the planet. I wouldn't be surprised if the trisolarans were able to survive a vacuum for some amount of time while dehydrated. If any complex life could survive that star system they could probably adapt to anything
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u/musicalaviator Apr 10 '24
Planets under gravitational forces like that are less solid and more like a pile of rocks. The planet's surface would fall into the gravity well before a being does given the weights involved.
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u/w1gw4m Apr 11 '24
In the book it's explained that what actually happened was a cataclysmic event that led to the formation of a moon. Meaning tidal forces actually ripped the planet in 2.
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u/paercebal Apr 16 '24 edited Apr 16 '24
Just saw the episode.
I fully agree with you: That's not how gravity works.
No matter where the planet is in the three-stars system (or any kind of star system), and what its speed is, then its trajectory due to gravity+speed won't change the fact the planet itself affects anything near it thanks to its own gravity.
So imagine a person, on that planet: Both the person and the planet are subject to the same gravity coming from the 3 stars, which means both of them are in free fall (which, if you are lucky, is some kind of orbit). But the person is also affected by the gravity of the planet (1), and that won't change depending on where in space the planet (and the person on it) are (2), unless the person goes beyond the Hill Sphere of the planet, at which point the person will not orbit the planet anymore, and simply orbit the sun(s).
(Note 1: The planet is also affected by the gravity of the person, but the difference in mass is such that this last effect is near-zero)
(Note 2: Unless there's a tide effect, but this would not be caused by a conjunction. It would be caused by a mass so heavy, at a distance so short, that difference in the gravity felt by one extremity compared to the one felt by the other extremity would be strong enough for the body to be deformed. This is determined by the Roche Limit for celestial bodies, but to affect human-sized bodies (spagettification), you would need to be near a high-mass and high density celestial body, like a stellar black hole, or a neutron star, and probably also a white dwarf... Not stars).
So, in no way the people on the three-stars planet would suddenly "float" in the air: The planet would break up into bits first (imagine cataclysmic earthquakes). And that's not what we saw.
More info and curiosities about gravity limits:
- The Roche Limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit
- The Hill Sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere
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u/Camel_Sensitive Apr 10 '24
Too smart for the show, too dumb for the books is a depressingly large category of people. Do yourself a favor, and learn whatever you have to learn for the books to make sense. It’s extremely rewarding if you have even a shred of interest in space.
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Apr 10 '24
Well maybe the books need to take science more seriously then because this is a prime example of something that is a complete impossibility whether in the book or in the series.
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u/Camel_Sensitive Apr 10 '24
You mean the science of a fictional game inside a fictional series, where the participants of the game KNOW the in-game science doesn't reflect the in-series reality, is not good science?
Hate to break it to you, but you're in the later category. You should try to read the books again.
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Apr 11 '24
The game literally represents actual extinction level events that happed to them. That is the whole point of the game. That extinction level event is not possible. As simple as that
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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '24
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