Future Forecast for Solar System: Worlds in Collision?

June 13, 2009

Astronomy’s equivalent of the “Great Pumpkin” from the Peanuts comic strip is popping up again on Internet traffic. For the sixth year in a row, an Internet message gone viral predicts that the planet Mars will look as "big as the full moon" later this year. 

Nope, not happening. But in our capricious universe, never say never.

A new computer simulation of the dynamical evolution of the solar system over the next 5 billion years suggests that our distant descendents could witness such a sky spectacle, just before the world is destroyed in a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

First, let's clear up the fantasy about a honkin’ big Mars in our skies this year.  This screwy idea got started in 2003 when the Red Planet passed within 34.7 million miles of Earth. Though Mars oppositions happen about every two years (as faster-moving Earth laps the Red Planet), the 2003 opposition was so close that the distance record won’t be broken again for at least another 60,000 years.

On August 27, 2009, when Mars is now predicted to be super-sized, it will be a comfortable 155 million miles away. What’s more, it won’t even be in the evening sky but in the morning sky, about 16 degrees from the bright red star Betelgeuse. Mars would have to come as close as roughly 500,000 miles to look as big as the full moon to the naked eye.The next Mars opposition isn’t until January 2010, when it will add some post-holiday cheer to the night sky as a bright red star (tell the kids that Rudolf’s nose is still glowing).

The roots of this myth seem to trace back to a claim in 2003 that said Mars would look as big as the moon, if you viewed the Red Planet at 75X magnification in an amateur telescope. I’ve seen Mars at even greater magnification and it doesn’t come close to being a mongo-Mars.  

But there is a one percent chance that our far distance descendants might someday look up into the sky and actually see Mars as bigger than the full moon!  This week a letter to the journal Nature, by Jacques Laskar (Paris Observatory) and colleague Mickael Gastineau, predicts there is a small chance the solar system could go chaotic in little over 3 billion years from now. The inner planets’ orbits could be modified so that they collide with each other.

I’m a little chagrin because I’ve spent my career debunking patently whacko theories like Immanuel Velikovsky's writings in Worlds in Collision. This and other Velikovsky books used mythology, Biblical scripture, and other ancient literary sources as evidence that Earth has suffered catastrophic near misses with other planets just a few thousand years ago. He hypothesized a solar system gone wild with planets bouncing around like pinballs. Gee, maybe Velikovsky was 3 billion years ahead of his time.

More recently we have the totally numbskull end-of world prediction for 2012 that the mythical planet Nibiru (sounds suspiciously like that planet Naboo where Star Wars princess Padme lives) is going to bypass the laws of gravity governing its purported 1,000-year solar orbit and suddenly swing by us to mess up the Earth. 

If any reader thinks this bogeyman planet is real please send me its present sky coordinates and orbital elements and I will publish them. What's more, there are no “hidden NASA pictures” as some conspiracy web sites claim. The phantom world is described  to be more that half Earth’s mass.  It should  be visible to naked eye by now, or at least through a small telescope, and be dutifully cataloged by the International Astronomical Union telegrams.

The Paris Observatory team came up with their own theoretically plausible doomsday scenario after running 2,501 numerical simulations of the dynamical evolution of the solar system over the next 5 billion years (the rest of the sun’s lifespan). Their calculations included the gravitational pull from the moon and effects of general relativity. 

In one simulation Mercury's orbit goes so eccentricity that the planet falls into the sun or collides with Venus. In another simulation run, Mercury's eccentricity causes angular momentum to be transferred from the giant outer planets. This destabilizes all the terrestrial planets 3.34 billion from now. In the Mother-of-All Apocalypses, Mercury, Mars or Venus smashes into Earth.

In another computer run there is a close encounter where Mars passes within 500 miles of Earth! Suffice to say Mars would look much bigger than the moon in the sky. Such a sideswipe would probably obliterate all higher life forms on the Earth.  Mars could be tidally ripped apart on approach and the pieces carpet bomb Earth. What’s left of Mars might form a ring around our lifeless planet – a meaningless tiara for an Earth thrown backward in time to the Haden era.

It is possible to test this scenario by doing an infrared survey of very mature sunlike stars that would have formed planets billion of years ago. An infrared excess indicting the glow of a dusty debris disk near the star could be explained as the disintegration of a planet due to collision processes. Roughly one out of 100 systems surveyed should show such a debris field, if the Paris Observatory computer simulations reflect reality.

On August 26, 2005, NASA’s Mercury Messenger spacecraft flew by Earth to rob momentum to help send it onto a rendezvous with Mercury. According to chaos theory, this infinitesimally small momentum exchange will be amplified over that hundreds of millions of years such that in the very far future Earth will be at a location on the opposite side of the sun on any given date, than it would have been if the flyby never happened.

If a simple flyby can induce that much of an effect over geologic time, than the chaos that will shape the future solar system is really anybody's guess.

But don’t expect to seen a pumpkin sized Mars anytime soon!

 

Comments

[Harvey Holloway]

As an amature astronomer with two light buckets,and a full set of good plossl eye pieces I know that you and not the predictors of a planetary colission in 2012 are right. I went to the planet x sight and was horrified that they did not realize that a coverup by NASA or anyone else would be useless. If any object so large as a planet was this close to earth, it is somthing I would be watching on video on u-tube and face book. There would be lots of it by now, and all from good amature scopes. NASA coverups would be useless therefore do not exist. Even if they try to claim this planet is hidden, the gravity of this object would be even now affecting the outer planets of our solar system. This is not happening. Velikovsky wrote a great book with a theory based on old books and questionable history. I do not believe it was intended to be used like this. From personaly having read his work I believe he understood that this should be established with good science, not ran away with even if wrong as is now the case. His works and research show him to be an intellegent man, even though the conclusion he arrived at was wrong. He also never made any prediction of 2012 as a colission date. This has been artificaly welded to the Inca prophecy by others. I remember no such prediction in his book. Harvey.