Inner solar system might go bonkers, maybe

William Atkins
Thursday, 11 June 2009 18:34

Science - Space

According to computer simulations by astronomers at the Paris Observatory, in the worst-case scenario, one of the inner planets, either Mercury, Venus, or Mars, could collide with Earth in just over three billion years.


The article from the Paris Observatory titled "Mercury, Mars, Venus and the Earth: when worlds collide!" begins by saying, "Are planetary collisions between Mercury, Mars, Venus and Earth possible? The question of the stability of the Solar System is one of the oldest problems in physics. In order to answer this question, the team of Paris observatory led by Jacques Laskar just completed a new statistical study on the evolution of the Solar System."

They found, "In about 1% of the cases, the calculations lead to collisions between planets or between a planet and the Sun in less than 5 billion years."

Jacques Laskar and Mickael Gastineau, both of the Paris Observatory, wrote up their conclusions in the June 11, 2009 issue of Nature.

It is titled “Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth.”

In the abstract to their paper, the two French astronomers stated, “In a set of 2,501 orbits with initial conditions that are in agreement with our present knowledge of the parameters of the Solar System, we found, as in previous studies, that one per cent of the solutions lead to a large increase in Mercury's eccentricity—an increase large enough to allow collisions with Venus or the Sun.”

And, “More surprisingly, in one of these high-eccentricity solutions, a subsequent decrease in Mercury's eccentricity induces a transfer of angular momentum from the giant planets that destabilizes all the terrestrial planets  3.34 Gyr from now, with possible collisions of Mercury, Mars or Venus with the Earth.”

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