"I Blew Up the Solar System" (repost from MySpace)

Tuesday, April 14, 2009
I Blew Up the Solar System...

It was science fiction, of course. Some science fiction authors have been so ambitious as to blow up the Universe. I just pulled out the standard simulation of our Solar system from the file in GravitySimulator and edited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune to have 10 times the mass of Jupiter.It collapsed immediately. Saturn fell towards Jupiter, which promptly went into an eccentric orbit with it's high point at about the same altitude it had but a considerably lower low point, somewhere in the middle of the asteroid belt. Saturn was propelled in to a high, cigar shaped orbit well beyond Pluto, but it's low point was about the same altitude as Jupiter's high point. Both began precessing unsteadily, with the direction their cigars were pointed in shifting back and forth.Meanwhile, Uranus started heading for Neptune , then fell back towards Jupiter. Uranus, too, was flung out into the outer realm of ice and darkness. After a big wobble, Neptune settled unsteadily into a somewhat more elliptical orbit at about the same altitude.

Poor Pluto got massacred right away. In 3200 years, we lost Mars.

Inside that, though, it was surprisingly stable. Earth kept orbiting in a nice circle, just like the ancients believed it did..This whole project was triggered when Mike Brown wrote a blog about Immanuel Kant. Kant was a philosopher in a day when there was little difference between philosophy, science, and religion. He saw galaxies in his telescope and correctly guessed that they were organized by gravity. He wrote quite beautiful descriptions of this particular manifestation of the wonders of the Universe..Mike Brown had been invited to review a book by Alan Boss, "The Crowded Universe", about the development and launch of the Kepler mission to find Earthlike planets of other stars. "The Crowded Universe" describes some of the research so far concerning extrasolar planets.

We don't see the cute round circles the ancients saw in the orbits of the planets. They're chaotic; they throw each other around like professional wrestlers..I got some feedback on my post from Kevin Heidar and Vagueofgodalming. Kevin Heidar noted the large change in mass, so I shut down the spectacular science-fiction simulation and instead did one with the gas giant's masses at one Jupiter. Kevin noted that this is a very large change and he is right.Vagueofgodalming noted that increased distance between the planets would create more stability. That should be true, I'll have to try it.

I believe I will have to start with the most massive array of planets first. These simulations take a long time unless there is large instability. One that ends quickly like the 40 Jmass total sim tell you something quickly. The 4 total Jmass simulation has now gone 14 million years, that might be a long time by human standards but it's a blink in the eye of the life of a star. I can see by the widening of the tracks of the orbits caused by a slightly different orbit every time that the 4 Jmass simulation has not reached stability.

One significant result of the 40 Jmass total simulation was that one planet only dropped a little and threw two other planets the same size a considerable distance. What this might mean is that if the inner gas giant is the predominant mass, it will protect inner planets including prospective terroids from the chaos beyond them. What that means is that the Kepler mission will find a larger number of them.The next three and a half years are going to be very interesting!

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=435573268&blogId=483317652

:)

Michael C. Emmert