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Couldn't resist; I had to check that "size of a planet" claim: 2.7 * 10^36 erg in tons TNT gives me (on Google) 6.45315488 × 10^19 tons TNT.

The area of Earth is around 5 × 10^8 km^2. So, 'planet size', that's about 10^11 tons TNT per square km, or 2,000 Tsar Bomba's per square km (Tsar Bobma was around 5-6 × 10^7 ton TNT equivalent).

Volume-wise, it would be about one Tsar Bomba per cubic kilometer of Earth.

So yes, I guess you could call that planet sized.




Well, when you work out the size of a few numbers regarding Tsar Bomba, I'd be more than happy to call those numbers indicative of planet sized. For instance.

  The TNT equivalent of the 50 Mt test could be represented by a cube of TNT 312 metres (1023 feet) on a side, approximately the height of the Eiffel Tower.
Which when you carry with your numbers, means that more than 9 (3^3) but much less than than 64 (4^3), (excuse the massive lack of accuracy but I'm doing a fermi estimate here, it seems appropriate) which are both massively less than 2000, which means that, the explosion you would get if you covered the earth with a 10Km 'crust' of TNT, would still not be bigger than this star when it goes off.

Id definitely call that planet sized.


More simply, the white dwarf star is the size of a planet, and its entire surface is detonating all at once. :)




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