Most planets can exist for a long, long time, but they can't last forever. Hungry stars and violent planetary neighbors can completely destroy a world, while impacts and excessive volcanism can render a habitable world sterile by stripping the planet of its water.
So, it's perfectly reasonably that a tiny amount of matter (or, in this case, antimatter) could destroy an entire planet.
The short answer is: not without a power plant that doesn't exist.
Many lines of evidence suggest more than one planetary explosion in the Solar System's history. The discovery of one, and probably two, new asteroid belts orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune is especially suggestive, given that the main asteroid belt is apparently of exploded planet origin.
In 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) demoted the much-loved Pluto from its position as the ninth planet from the Sun to one of five “dwarf planets.” The IAU had likely not anticipated the widespread outrage that followed the change in the solar system's lineup.
Most planets can exist for a long, long time, but they can't last forever. Hungry stars and violent planetary neighbors can completely destroy a world, while impacts and excessive volcanism can render a habitable world sterile by stripping the planet of its water.
Putilin suggested that Phaeton was destroyed due to centrifugal forces, giving it a diameter of approximately 6,880 kilometers (slightly larger than Mars' diameter of 6,779 km) and a rotational speed of 2.6 hours.
If we could make (and contain) a solid "chunk" of antimatter like this, keep it on board our Death Star, carve a path to the planet's core (which an actual laser could do) and deliver this antimatter to it, it'd be the perfect way to literally destroy the Earth, Alderaan, or whatever planet we chose.
During planetary-system formation, several small protoplanetary bodies may be ejected from the system. An ejected body would receive less of the stellar-generated ultraviolet light that can strip away the lighter elements of its atmosphere.
At the current rate of solar brightening—just over 1% every 100 million years—Earth would suffer this "runaway greenhouse" in 600 million to 700 million years. Earth will suffer some preliminary effects leading up to that, too.
One day, Mercury could slam into Earth, obliterating all life on our planet. That's a doomsday scenario scientists have said is a small but real possibility. Now, new simulations of our solar system's future suggest such a catastrophe is less likely than previously thought. Still, not everyone agrees that we're safe.
The inequality suggests that to destroy a black hole, all you need to do is to feed it angular momentum and charge. But that hides a multitude of problems. For a start, things with angular momentum and charge also tend to have mass. And in any case, the equation above describes a steady state.
Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
But to really wipe life off the planet, it would take an astrophysical event so powerful that Earth's oceans would literally boil away, according to a new study. The heat and cosmic radiation would make Earth inhospitable even to tardigrades, among the hardiest organisms ever discovered.
Humans have certainly had a profound effect on their environment, but our current claim to dominance is based on criteria that we have chosen ourselves. Ants outnumber us, trees outlive us, fungi outweigh us. Bacteria win on all of these counts at once.
Most of the stars that make up our constellations are just like the sun - they won't ever explode. Only the most massive stars in the universe go supernova. But the 10th brightest star visible from Earth is Betelgeuse, a red supergiant that will indeed end its life with a bang.
Once there is no fuel left, the star collapses and the outer layers explode as a 'supernova'. What's left over after a supernova explosion is a 'neutron star' – the collapsed core of the star – or, if there's sufficient mass, a black hole.
The 2015 film The Force Awakens introduces Starkiller Base, a planet converted by the First Order into a Death Star-like weapon. While more powerful and technologically advanced than both Death Stars, it is also destroyed by the Resistance.
The current count orbiting our star: eight. The inner, rocky planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. NASA's newest rover — Perseverance — landed on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. The outer planets are gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and ice giants Uranus and Neptune.
What happened to Pluto? Did it blow up, or go hurtling out of its orbit? Pluto is still very much a part of our Solar System, it's just no longer considered a planet.
Astronomers have spotted a bright flash from a huge space rock slamming into Jupiter. This impact flash, seen in October 2021, was the brightest one since comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit the planet in 1994. Impact flashes on other worlds are similar to meteorite strikes on Earth, but only the largest are visible from afar.
Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old, plus or minus about 50 million years. Scientists have scoured the Earth searching for the oldest rocks to radiometrically date.
Space emits many wavelengths of light - including a lot of blue and red light that our human eyes can see - but also ultraviolet light, gamma rays, and X-rays, which remain invisible to us.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.