admin Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System with a mass 2.5 times that of all planets combined. The Sun makes up 99.9% of the mass of the entire Solar System. So, if Mars and Jupiter trade places, this could disrupt the balance of the Solar System and destroy any life on Earth.
The balance of the entire Solar System is a very fragile reality, as it is directly related to the gravitational attraction between the planets. Swapping the orbits of two of the planets in the Solar System would probably break this balance. If Mars and Jupiter suddenly swap positions, how will Earth be affected?
The Sun and Jupiter are the two largest objects in our solar system. The gravitational pull of these giant bodies affects each other’s motion. And they have a big impact on the motion of all the planets, moons and other asteroids in our cosmic region.
On the inside of this ring is the fourth planet from the Sun and our neighbor, Mars. The red planet lies only 78 million km from Earth. That means it’s eight times closer to us than Jupiter.
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun, about 778 million km away. And it is this gas giant’s immense gravitational pull that causes the asteroid belt to separate the inner and outer regions of the Solar System. So if these two planets all of a sudden swapped orbits, then the millions of rocky objects in the asteroid belt would be coming straight for us?
Let’s start by seeing how Mars will operate in this orbital transition. Now it will be trapped between the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. This would put the red planet in an uncomfortable position as there are two largest planets in the Solar System on either side of it. And the discomfort here is in fact the very fact that it’s going to be influenced by the gravitational pull of two gas giants.
But the traction between the two is not even. And Mars will suffer a fate similar to Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Like Io, Mars will experience a more powerful pull on its opposite side of Jupiter, which will cause Mars to simultaneously stretch out and compress, whereby it will start to heat from within.
This is why Io has more active eruptions and volcanoes than anywhere else in the Solar System. And if Mars were to swap positions with Jupiter then the gravitational pull might be strong enough now to reactivate some of the ancient volcanoes on the red planet – you might see lava erupting from Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System.
Going back to where we are in the Asteroid Belt, things are going to get interesting here on Earth. The first big change that you notice is that the night sky is slightly different. Jupiter initially appears as a distant bright star that would now become about 20% larger than the Moon. If you look up at the sky on a nice night, you can see its colorful bands and spots.
However, it is only outward appearance, that when Mars and Jupiter interconvert, the gravitational pull of Jupiter will be about 64 times stronger than it currently is. In fact, Jupiter has had a remote impact on us. Every 405,000 years, its pull, along with Venus, will cause droughts and heavy rains on our planet.
With a distance like this, the effect is bound to be more extreme. Stuck between the Sun and Jupiter, our planet will have catastrophic problems with tidal bulge. So what you once knew was a lovely, habitable home turned into a volcanic hell.
With Jupiter unexpectedly on the opposite side of the asteroid belt, all of those millions of rocks will be pulled in new directions towards it. And that would cause more asteroid collisions with the Earth.
Objects in the asteroid belt vary in size. In terms of mass, there’s the dwarf planet Ceres. It is about 25% the size of our Moon. Of the asteroids, Vesta has a diameter of 530 km. And if these things were to hit Earth, it would cause a catastrophic extinction of the planet.
A collision with an object about 1 kilometer in size has been destructible enough to put an end to us. If an asteroid about 10 kilometers in diameter were to hit our planet, the Sun would be hidden by smog for a year or more.
Without the sunlight, we’d have experienced so-called winter impacts. The temperature will drop and the photosynthesis will stop. All of this will lead to the mass extinction of plants, animals and human life.
