Posted on 05/01/2008 7:39:20 PM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets
First, the bad news: the inner solar system is unstable. Given enough time, Jupiter's gravity could yank Mercury out of its present orbit.
Two new computer simulations of long-term planetary motion — one by Jacques Laskar (Paris Observatory), the other by Konstantin Batygin and Gregory Laughlin (University of California, Santa Cruz) — have both reached the same disturbing conclusion.
Says Laughlin, "The solar system isn't as stable as we'd thought." Both teams have found that Jupiter's gravity can increase Mercury's orbital eccentricity over time. Mercury's path around the Sun is already nearly as elliptical as Pluto's. But Jupiter can make Mercury's orbit so out of round that it overlaps the path of Venus. A close encounter between them could send the innermost planet careening off wildly.
"Once Mercury crosses Venus's orbit," Laughlin says, "Mercury is in serious trouble."
So is Earth.
At that point, the simulations predict Mercury will suffer generally one of four fates: it crashes into the Sun, gets ejected from the solar system, it crashes into Venus, or — worst of all — crashes into Earth.
To call this catastrophic is a gross understatement. Such an impact would kill all life on our planet. Nothing would survive. By contrast, the asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was likely just 6 miles in diameter; Mercury is 3,032 miles across. The last time an object about that size hit the Earth, the resulting debris formed our Moon.
Think we'll escape the chaos by fleeing to Mars? Think again. Even Mars might not be safe. In one of the computer simulations, the Red Planet was tossed into the cold of interstellar space.
Now, the good news: there's only about a 1% chance that Mercury will go crazy before the Sun bloats into a red giant billions of years from now. "If you're an optimist," says Laughlin, "then you say the glass is 99 percent full."
Laskar, who discovered that Mercury could go wild back in 1994, will publish his paper in Icarus; Batygin (who's still an undergraduate) and Laughlin will publish theirs in The Astrophysical Journal.
100 to 1 stretched over 7.5 billion years is very long odds.
Still a lot better than 1 with 50 million zeros.
I think perhaps you misapprehend. Although not explicitly stated there is no chance whatsoever that we will go to bed some evening and see Mercury looming next to the moon. If Mercury becomes unstable, the process will take literally millions of years. If it were to happen and we maintain our current level of technology, we will see it coming a million years before it happens.
As of today, no one can say for certain whether or not it will ever occur.
Note: this topic is from May 1, 2008. Thanks Lonesome in Massachussets.There may have been a topic about this (hard to believe, I know) that was pinged, but regardless, pingin' this one.
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All of that is before you get to any sort of an idea about electricity having anything to do with orbits or stability of course...
That purported law is really just a mnemonic, to help memorize the intervals.
s’more about TBL, from the late TVF:
Where It Began – the Titius-Bode Law of Planetary Spacing
http://metaresearch.org/publications/bulletin/2006issues/1215/Mrb06dp4.asp
The Original Solar System
http://metaresearch.org/solar%20system/origins/original-solar-system.asp
I will admit that a collision with Mercury would do the job thoroughly, though if humanity is still around in a few billion years it is quite possible we will have the ability to do something about it.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of those two items on metaresearch.
My pleasure. OTOH, TVF postulated an exploding planet for the K-T extinction impact events, as well as another one he’d postulated (hence his need for a revised EPH), because he remained convinced that Jupiter would clean the inner Solar System of all debris from his exploding planets within 10 million years. That of course should have suggested to him that he may have been mistaken about the source of (all, not just some) inner Solar System debris, but he was so sure he was on the right track that he couldn’t come to that conclusion.
Yeah, I’m not going to sweat it too much. Within one billion years the Earth will likely make contact (euphemism) with a plus-one-mile impactor, basically a piece of debris — and not just once, more than sixty times. And probably at least eight of those will be well over a mile in diameter.
Nobody really has the time machine you’d want for a totally accurate picture of the pre-history of our system. To me the biggest single clue is the thing about the axis tilts. Van Flandern might have been right about fissioning being the general source or a general source of new planets but the thing about Earth, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune having tilts in the narrow 23 - 28 degree range does indicate a likelihood of their having been captured as a system.
Yes, but Mercury colliding with Earth is only one of many, many ways our planet can meet her doom.
Heck, we're due for a massive Yellowstone eruption. These take place about once every 600,000 years. The last one was 600,000 years ago. Think Obamacare will be bad for the country? This will be much worse! LOL!
Oh great.
Mercury poisoning.
My prediction: Mercury into Venus, Venus into Earth, Earth in the side pocket.
The narrow range of axial tiltes for some of the planets also fits an (more than one) unstable rotation model.
I think Freddy hit Uranus.
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