Class Project

Avengers: Infinity War is one of my favorite super hero movies. It is an enthralling tale of superheroes teaming up to take down the evil threat of Thanos. The more I watch the movie, the more I think about if the film makers are truly capturing the grand scale of the world shattering hits that the heroes and villains dish out. One scene in particular that I want to focus on in this post is when Thanos throws the moon at Iron Man. More specifically, I want to try and figure out how much mechanical energy Thanos would add to the system by throwing the moon.

To figure how much mechanical energy the system has after Thanos drags the moon down onto Iron Man, we need to assume a couple things. The three things we have to assume is that Titan, the planet they are all on, is the same size as Earth and that its moon is the same size as our moon and the distance between Titan and its moon is the same as the distance between Earth and the Moon. The first thing that needs to be calculated is the average force Thanos needs to apply to the moon to pull it down. To do this, we first need to find the average acceleration which could be found by estimating the time that the moon takes to reach the surface of Titan and then dividing that by  the distance between Earth and the moon to get the final velocity before it hits Titan. Then, finding the average velocity of the moon and dividing that by the time, you get the average acceleration. Take that acceleration and multiply it by the moon's mass to get the average force Thanos applies to the moon. To find how much energy that takes, you need to find the work Thanos did to the moon. To find that, multiply the average force and the distance it was applied over (which is the distance between the Earth and the Moon). 

To understand the magnitude of the energy Thanos adds to this system, we would want to find what the mechanical energy of the system is after the collision. The mechanical energy after would equal the mechanical energy before added to the work Thanos did to the moon. The initial mechanical energy of the system is the kinetic energy of the Moon's velocity around the Earth added to the gravitation energy of the Earth on the Moon. When all is calculated the mechanical energy of the system after Thanos throws the moon is 8.49 x 10^37 Joules. To put that into perspective, the world's most powerful bomb ever testing was the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba and it had a yield of 50 Megatons (or about 2.092 x 10^17 Joules) which means the mechanical energy after Thanos throws the moon is a little more than 4 x 10^20 times bigger, or 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more energetic than the largest bomb ever created.