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Earth Could Collide With Other Planets
Everybody put on your helmet;
Smivs writes "Astronomers calculate there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth — though it would not happen for at least a billion years.
The finding comes from simulations to show how orbits of planets might evolve billions of years into the future. But the calculated chances of such events occurring are tiny. Writing in the journal Nature, a team led by Jacques Laskar shows there is also a chance Mercury could strike Venus and merge into a larger planet. Professor Laskar of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues also report that Mars might experience a close encounter with Jupiter — whose massive gravity could hurl the Red Planet out of our Solar System."
As Stephen King said, "Everything's eventual."
Yeah, man, everything's REAL eventual :-)
Great line - I keep telling myself that.
With the movie remake of When Worlds Collide due out in 2010, a story like this would be one way to create a buzz.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455856/
ceci n'est pas un sig
Think of it in terms of two cars colliding head-on, literally on a planetary scale: the planetary crust that seems like solid rock to you on the human scale is more like the crumple zone of a car's frame. When the planets collide, they would buckle and fuse together. In the example of 2 cars colliding, there would likely be some rebound and the cars would come to rest a few feet apart (the cars' respective centres of gravity are insignificant compared to the forces of friction on the pavement). On the planetary scale, what's left of the planets' respective centres of gravity would continue to pull & keep them together (with a relatively small percentage of debris lost, most of that would then be recaptured into orbit for the immediate future).
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
Hey Thanks! Here's a good survey of 'symplectic integrators': http://math.berkeley.edu/~alanw/242papers99/markiewicz.pdf Basically, choosing the parameters of your integration scheme smartly (based on the system you're integrating) so you do a better job at conserving energy for long time integrations. The example they give in that survey article is exactly this problem (solar system orbit simulation).
The current theory is that a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth sometime in history. When this planet, usually named Theia, collided with Earth, some of the disturbed matter from both planets got ejected into space, some fell onto and became part of Earth, and some got caught in orbit around Earth as natural satellites.
The resulting dust either escaped or eventually coalesced into the modern Earth and Moon.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
As Stephen King said, "Everything's eventual."
He did not. I'm sure he said those words at some point, but not as a statement. He entitled a story "Everything's Eventual" (hell, likely as not, his editor entitled it). Pat Conroy did not say "The lords of discipline", John Barth did not say "Lost in the funhouse", and Douglas Beane did not say "Too wong foo, thanks for everything, Julie Newmar". Yeesh! This is even worse than people who attribute characters' quotes to the author directly.