Dead Planets Society: Bringing Back Geocentrism

The ancient Greeks once proposed the Earth was at the centre of our solar system and everything orbited us. We like that idea. Let’s make it happen.

But as Dead Planeteers Leah and Chelsea find out, if you bring back geocentrism, Earth would only be king of the universe for a very, very short time – before all hell breaks loose.

It starts with enlarging the earth and potentially turning it into a black hole, we then have all the planets hurtling towards us through space, then it ends with a visit from Alpha Centauri. 

Helping them to work out the science (and suspend the rules of physics now and again), is asteroid researcher and planetary astronomer Andy Rivkin.

Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from punching a hole in a planet to unifying the asteroid belt to destroying the sun – and subjects them to the laws of physics to see how they fare.

Your hosts are Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte.

If you have a cosmic object you’d like to figure out how to destroy, email the team at deadplanets@newscientist.com. It may just feature in a later episode.

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