How much energy, in terms of hours or days of solar output, would it take to strip the atmosphere off of Uranus and get at its valuable rocky core, which I call Terra-Uranus?
Uranus has an escape velocity of 21.3 X 103 m s-1. It has a mass of 8.68 X 1025 kg, equivalent to 14.5 Earths. The rocky core has a mass of 0.55 Earth's mass, so the mass of everything else on Uranus you'd want to remove suggests the calculation [(14.5 - 0.55)/14.5] X 8.68 X 1025 kg = 8.35 X 1025 kg.
The kinetic energy E of a mass m moving at a subrelativistic velocity v has the formula E = 1/2 mv2.
Therefore I can naively calculate the kinetic energy of moving that much mass away from Uranus at its escape velocity:
E = 1/2 X 8.35 X 1025 kg x (21.3 X 103 m s-1)2 = 1.89 X 1034 J
The sun has a power output of 4 X 1026 J s-1, so to calculate how long it would take the sun's power to release that much energy, divide 1.89 X 1034 J/(4 X 1026 J s-1) = 47.3 X 106 seconds, or about 550 days of solar output, assuming you could capture it at 100 percent efficiency.
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