Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Tuesday 2 October 2018

Living on a high gravity planet is possible

According to a small team of physicists from the University of Zagreb in Croatia, we really wouldn't want to be setting our sights on planets with a mass that's any greater than four times that of our Earth's. And that's after no small amount of training.

The scientists arrived at this critical figure after taking into account the compressibility of human bones, the flexion of our muscles, and the swinging nature of our legs as we stride across a planet's surface. Our bones are impressive structures as far as engineering goes. In fact, our tibia could handle something like 90 times Earth's gravity (g) before splintering.

That's an insane amount of force, but things change if we try to take a step on such a supersized world. Dynamic stresses and twisting effects would make short work of our skeleton, lowering the actual limit to something closer to 10 g.

That is until you take into account the fact we'd need to move. Crunching the numbers on the power of human muscle, the researchers determined with rigorous training we just might be able to push against gravity that's no more than around 5 g.

https://www.sciencealert.com/limits-gravity-human-body-endurance-exoplanets

1 comment:

  1. I would not have any problems that would have a planet with reduced gravity in the morning (let's say 0.3g) to make getting up easier ;-).

    ReplyDelete

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