Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff, Laurin Vogelbaum. Here, we all know that the planets of the Solar System revolve around the Sun in a calm and orderly fashion. In fact, the planets move with such clockwork precision that astronomers can calculate orbital characteristics like eclipses and planetary alignments with certainty. Want a list of solar eclipses for the next ten thousand years, No problem. And now let's say you want to look further into the future, not thousands of years, but billions. How will those dusty astronomical tables hold up? Then? Not so well if you take into account the principles of chaos theory. A chaos theory says that small inputs in an enormously complex system can produce large scale outputs. This is what's sometimes called the butterfly effect. The idea is that when a butterfly flaps its wings in say Brazil, it could lead to a chain reaction that causes a thunderstorm to develop over Australia. Some scientists now propose that the evolution of the Solar system may adhere to chaos theory, and that way way way into the future. This could cause Earth to collide with either Venus or Mars. A pair of scientists from the Paris Observatory published a letter with this determination in an issue of the journal Nature back in two thousand and nine. For their research, they tapped into the power of the Jade supercomputer, located at France's National Computing Center for Higher Education and Research, which at the time was around the twentieth most powerful computer in the world. So what were they trying to calculate with that veritable muscle car of computational capacity. It has to do with Isaac Newton's universal law of gravitation, which states that gravity exists between any to given objects. This gravitational force is directly proportional to the object's masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them, meaning that the more massive an object is, the more gravity it will exert on another object, but the further away an object is, the less gravity it will exert on another object. A Newton then proposed that the Sun's gravity is what holds the planets in their orbits. But it's not that simple. According to his own law, the planets and all of the other objects in the Solar System, including moons and asteroids, also exert at least a little gravity on each other. So could the complex interplay of those forces cause the stability of the Solar System to degrade over time in the short term Nope. Even over longer periods, astronomers have generally supported the idea that the Solar System would remain stable. It just sort of makes sense. After all, the Sun is overwhelmingly more massive than anything else in the Solar System. Out of the Solar System's total mass, the Sun accounts for ninety nine point eight percent of it. But a few cosmologists began to wonder if chaos theory might apply to planetary orbits. If so, small changes in planetary movements could get magnified over time into something substantial. But how long would it take? Thousands of years, millions billions? To answer that question, you'd have to build a sort of model to account for the movements of all of the planets, as well as all of the forces being exerted as that movement occurs. Then you'd need to let your Solar system model run like a clock. So the planets cycled through hundreds of thousands of orbits. As this occurred, you'd need to track key data about each planet. One of the most important pieces of data to collect would be orbital eccentricity, which is a measure of how far a planet deviates from a perfectly circular shape as it moves around the Sun. Orbital eccentricity determines whether two planets might come closer to having a close encounter. This is not the kind of simulation you could run in your head or with whatever fancy device you have at home, which is why the researchers selected the Jade's supercomputer to do their heavy lifting. Their inputs consisted of two five hundred and one orbital scenarios, where each one altered Mercury's orbit by just a few millimeters. They chose Mercury because, as the runt of the Solar System, it's the biggest pushover, and because its orbit synchronizes with jupiters to create changes that ripple across the entire Solar System. For each hypothetical scenario, they tracked the motion of all planets for more than five billion years, which is the estimated life span of the Sun. Even with the high powered CPU in the Jade unit, each solution required four months of computing to generate results. Luckily, for any future life on Earth, the Solar System remained stable in ninety nine percent of the researcher's scenarios. That is, no planets got set on collision courses or ejected from their orbits. But in one percent of their models, the ones in which the orbital chaos had the greatest cumulative effect, Mercury's orbit became eccentric enough to cause catastrophic changes in the Solar System. Some of those catastrophes only involved Mercury, which could either crash into the Sun or get dislodged from its orbit and flung out into space, but other scenarios played out with Earth colliding into either Mars or Venus. According to their models, collision with Venus would occur through five steps, all of which illustrate the cumulative effects orbital chaos. First, interaction between Jupiter and Mercury about three point one three seven billion years in the future, could cause the orbital eccentricity of Mercury to increase. This would transfer some angular momentum from the outer planets to the inner planets. This transfer would destabilize the rest of the inner planets, so the orbital eccentricities of Venus, Earth, and Mars would increase. This would cause Earth to have a near miss with Mars, which would disturb the eccentricity of Mars even more. This would cause some weird reinforcing interactions among the inner planets to decrease the eccentricity of Mercury but further increase the eccentricities of Venus and Earth. Venus and Earth would have several near misses until at three point three five two eight nine one billion years in the future, the two planets collided in an epic explosion that would destroy both worlds. Again. In ninety nine percent of their simulations, everything was fine until the Sun died. Of course, none of these models may be accurate at all. First of all, we're still discovering new bodies around our Solar System like asteroids, moons, and comets all the time, and relatedly, they could make more of a difference than the researchers originally accounted for. In a follow up study of the same scientists along with a larger team, looked at interactions between some of the large bodies in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, including the dwarf planet Series and major asteroids like Palace and Vesta. They then extrapolated out what those interactions would mean for the planets. What they concluded was that the chaotic interactions between Series and Vesta specifically, should quickly amplify even the tiniest of measurement errors, making it impossible to predict what planetary orbits should look like based on the current information beyond just sixty million years into the future or into the past. Basically, all of this means that the Solar System is filled with lots of stuff, and even though it's pretty spread out, all of these objects exert gravitational force on one another, and these forces can change planetary orbits a lot, even if we can't measure those changes very accurately. In fact, astronomers have evidence of other Solar systems self destructing. In two thousand and eight, a team from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics spotted a Saturn sized planet orbiting a star in the constellation Centaurus that was giving off way too much heat for its planetary size. The scientists believe that the planet is radiating massive amounts of heat because of a collision with a Urinous sized Protoplanet in the astronomically recent past, and in two thousand and nine, NASA's Spitzer space telescope spotted the aftermath of a mash up between an object the size of our moon and another the size of mercury, about one hundred light years away in the constellation Pavo. The peacock instruments on Spitzer detected the teltale signatures of amorphous silica, a substance that forms on Earth when meteorites slam into the ground. Of course, even if our solar system doesn't succumb to orbital chaos and a Billiard like crashing of the inner planets, stars don't last forever. In about five billion years, when the Sun exhausts fuel supply, all of the inner planets will disappear into the belly of our rapidly expanding star. Either way, chaos induced collision or stellar death, our tiny blue world won't go out with a whimper, but with a bang. Today's episode a space the article will orbital chaos cause Earth, Venus, and Mars to collide On HowStuffWorks dot com written by William Harris. Rain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot com and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff, Laurin Vogelbaum. Here, we all know that the planets of the Solar System revolve around the Sun in a calm and orderly fashion. In fact, the planets move with such clockwork precision that astronomers can calculate orbital characteristics like eclipses and planetary alignments with certainty. Want a list of solar eclipses for the next ten thousand years, No problem. And now let's say you want to look further into the future, not thousands of years, but billions. How will those dusty astronomical tables hold up? Then? Not so well if you take into account the principles of chaos theory. A chaos theory says that small inputs in an enormously complex system can produce large scale outputs. This is what's sometimes called the butterfly effect. The idea is that when a butterfly flaps its wings in say Brazil, it could lead to a chain reaction that causes a thunderstorm to develop over Australia. Some scientists now propose that the evolution of the Solar system may adhere to chaos theory, and that way way way into the future. This could cause Earth to collide with either Venus or Mars. A pair of scientists from the Paris Observatory published a letter with this determination in an issue of the journal Nature back in two thousand and nine. For their research, they tapped into the power of the Jade supercomputer, located at France's National Computing Center for Higher Education and Research, which at the time was around the twentieth most powerful computer in the world. So what were they trying to calculate with that veritable muscle car of computational capacity. It has to do with Isaac Newton's universal law of gravitation, which states that gravity exists between any to given objects. This gravitational force is directly proportional to the object's masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them, meaning that the more massive an object is, the more gravity it will exert on another object, but the further away an object is, the less gravity it will exert on another object. A Newton then proposed that the Sun's gravity is what holds the planets in their orbits. But it's not that simple. According to his own law, the planets and all of the other objects in the Solar System, including moons and asteroids, also exert at least a little gravity on each other. So could the complex interplay of those forces cause the stability of the Solar System to degrade over time in the short term Nope. Even over longer periods, astronomers have generally supported the idea that the Solar System would remain stable. It just sort of makes sense. After all, the Sun is overwhelmingly more massive than anything else in the Solar System. Out of the Solar System's total mass, the Sun accounts for ninety nine point eight percent of it. But a few cosmologists began to wonder if chaos theory might apply to planetary orbits. If so, small changes in planetary movements could get magnified over time into something substantial. But how long would it take? Thousands of years, millions billions? To answer that question, you'd have to build a sort of model to account for the movements of all of the planets, as well as all of the forces being exerted as that movement occurs. Then you'd need to let your Solar system model run like a clock. So the planets cycled through hundreds of thousands of orbits. As this occurred, you'd need to track key data about each planet. One of the most important pieces of data to collect would be orbital eccentricity, which is a measure of how far a planet deviates from a perfectly circular shape as it moves around the Sun. Orbital eccentricity determines whether two planets might come closer to having a close encounter. This is not the kind of simulation you could run in your head or with whatever fancy device you have at home, which is why the researchers selected the Jade's supercomputer to do their heavy lifting. Their inputs consisted of two five hundred and one orbital scenarios, where each one altered Mercury's orbit by just a few millimeters. They chose Mercury because, as the runt of the Solar System, it's the biggest pushover, and because its orbit synchronizes with jupiters to create changes that ripple across the entire Solar System. For each hypothetical scenario, they tracked the motion of all planets for more than five billion years, which is the estimated life span of the Sun. Even with the high powered CPU in the Jade unit, each solution required four months of computing to generate results. Luckily, for any future life on Earth, the Solar System remained stable in ninety nine percent of the researcher's scenarios. That is, no planets got set on collision courses or ejected from their orbits. But in one percent of their models, the ones in which the orbital chaos had the greatest cumulative effect, Mercury's orbit became eccentric enough to cause catastrophic changes in the Solar System. Some of those catastrophes only involved Mercury, which could either crash into the Sun or get dislodged from its orbit and flung out into space, but other scenarios played out with Earth colliding into either Mars or Venus. According to their models, collision with Venus would occur through five steps, all of which illustrate the cumulative effects orbital chaos. First, interaction between Jupiter and Mercury about three point one three seven billion years in the future, could cause the orbital eccentricity of Mercury to increase. This would transfer some angular momentum from the outer planets to the inner planets. This transfer would destabilize the rest of the inner planets, so the orbital eccentricities of Venus, Earth, and Mars would increase. This would cause Earth to have a near miss with Mars, which would disturb the eccentricity of Mars even more. This would cause some weird reinforcing interactions among the inner planets to decrease the eccentricity of Mercury but further increase the eccentricities of Venus and Earth. Venus and Earth would have several near misses until at three point three five two eight nine one billion years in the future, the two planets collided in an epic explosion that would destroy both worlds. Again. In ninety nine percent of their simulations, everything was fine until the Sun died. Of course, none of these models may be accurate at all. First of all, we're still discovering new bodies around our Solar System like asteroids, moons, and comets all the time, and relatedly, they could make more of a difference than the researchers originally accounted for. In a follow up study of the same scientists along with a larger team, looked at interactions between some of the large bodies in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, including the dwarf planet Series and major asteroids like Palace and Vesta. They then extrapolated out what those interactions would mean for the planets. What they concluded was that the chaotic interactions between Series and Vesta specifically, should quickly amplify even the tiniest of measurement errors, making it impossible to predict what planetary orbits should look like based on the current information beyond just sixty million years into the future or into the past. Basically, all of this means that the Solar System is filled with lots of stuff, and even though it's pretty spread out, all of these objects exert gravitational force on one another, and these forces can change planetary orbits a lot, even if we can't measure those changes very accurately. In fact, astronomers have evidence of other Solar systems self destructing. In two thousand and eight, a team from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics spotted a Saturn sized planet orbiting a star in the constellation Centaurus that was giving off way too much heat for its planetary size. The scientists believe that the planet is radiating massive amounts of heat because of a collision with a Urinous sized Protoplanet in the astronomically recent past, and in two thousand and nine, NASA's Spitzer space telescope spotted the aftermath of a mash up between an object the size of our moon and another the size of mercury, about one hundred light years away in the constellation Pavo. The peacock instruments on Spitzer detected the teltale signatures of amorphous silica, a substance that forms on Earth when meteorites slam into the ground. Of course, even if our solar system doesn't succumb to orbital chaos and a Billiard like crashing of the inner planets, stars don't last forever. In about five billion years, when the Sun exhausts fuel supply, all of the inner planets will disappear into the belly of our rapidly expanding star. Either way, chaos induced collision or stellar death, our tiny blue world won't go out with a whimper, but with a bang. Today's episode a space the article will orbital chaos cause Earth, Venus, and Mars to collide On HowStuffWorks dot com written by William Harris. Rain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot com and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.