Physics students calculate how much power Santa’s sleigh needs to visit all the world’s children
Visiting all the children on Earth in one night requires serious horsepower (or, reindeerpower?) and now we know exactly how much.
According to research carried out by undergraduates at the University of Leicester, Santa’s sleigh is able to output the same level of thrust as the Saturn V rocket that powered Nasa’s Apollo missions.
The study was inspired by a scene in the 2003 movie Elf, in which Santa replaces the waning Christmas spirit with a jet engine.
The students calculated the thrust required for Santa’s sleigh to remain in flight during his Christmas Eve travels, and how powerful that jet engine would have to be.
For the sleigh to remain in level flight, its weight must be balanced by the lift – which is when air flows over a wing at a lower pressure than the air flowing under it.
Assuming the sleigh has a pair of wings attached (and accounting for the weight of all the presents for the children of the world) the students calculated the sleigh must move at 5500m/s – or around 10 times the speed of sound, in order to generate enough lift.
An engine powering the sleigh at that speed would need to provide enough thrust to not only stay at that speed, but also balance the effect of air resistance, which would be greater at high speed.
They worked out that this would require 38 million newtons of thrust – roughly equivalent to 150 Boeing 747-400 engines or the Saturn V rocket used for the Apollo missions during the 1960s and 1970s.
Ryan Rowe, one of the student authors of the paper, said: ‘We have concluded that Santa’s jet engine must be extremely powerful and as a result he and the elves must have access to advanced technologies.’
The students conclusions have been published in the University’s Journal of Physics Special Topics, which enables undergraduate Physics students to learn about the process of peer review by writing and reviewing papers by applying theoretical concepts to light-hearted ideas.
Professor Mervyn Roy, Director of Education for the School of Physics and Astronomy, said: ‘In the Physics Special Topics module, we ask students to formulate new problems that can be explored using some of the simple physics that they know – and they often choose fun, imaginative topics.
‘The process that the students go through mimics that of real research physicists working on exciting topics from black holes to cancer treatment. We have to investigate new problems and approach their solution in a creative way, we have to clearly communicate our findings, and these results are checked by fellow scientists as part of the peer-review process.’
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