Can incredibly large amounts of radiation destroy a small planet?

Question

Can incredibly large amounts of radiation destroy a small planet?

Answer 1

NO. But it will kill all life...

Answer 2

Incredibly large amounts of energy can destroy anything. It depends on how you define incredibly large.

For example, the Earth receives a power of about 200 PetaWatts in solar radiation. I would consider that an incredible amount.

Mercury is a smaller planet, but is much much closer to the sun, therefore it receives an even higher amount of solar radiation, yet it is still there.

Answer 3

Theoretically, enough energy can destroy pretty much anything. That said, the kind of radiation levels necessary to destroy a whole planet don't occur very often in the Universe. The energy from a standard, run-of-the-mill supernova (if there is such a thing :P) would cause severe damage to a planet, but might not be enough to destroy it. In order to completely annihilate a planet with light, your best bet would be to have it right in the path of a gamma ray burst. Gamma ray bursts, or GRBs, are the most powerful explosions of radiation in the Universe, thought to occur when two massive black holes collide. The amount of energy in a gamma ray burst, the peak of which lasts for a few seconds, can exceed the entire energy output of the Sun over its entire lifespan of ten billion years. To put it another way, the energy is roughly on the same scale as converting the entire mass of the Earth into energy (considering that converting one button on the monitor in front of you into energy would be equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb). If a planet were close enough, the radiation could definitely destroy it, although it seems to me rather unlikely that a planet would normally exist close enough to receive enough of the energy (it would also have to be positioned almost precisely along the poles of the gamma ray burst, as the radiation is far higher there). So in theory, it could be done...but in practice, it would be an extremely rare event and may not have happened since the beginning of the Universe.

Answer 4

If you're talking about a planet caught in a beam from a gamma ray burst taking place withing a 100 light years or so, the answer is yes. Gamma ray bursts are the birth pangs of black holes created by the collapse of rapidly rotating, very massive stars. The jets fired off along the dying star's rotational axis can focus more gamma rays into each jet than the emissions of dozens of large galaxies like the Milky Way. In other words, they can pack trillions of times more energy than the Sun, all focuses into a narrow laser like beam that would wipe out everything in their path.