Would the disruption of another planet/moons orbit in our solar system, disrupt our orbit too?

Question

I mean without crashing into us.

Example, a sudden loss of mass causes Saturn to lose its current orbit. Would that effect earth at all?

Ofcourse this is just an example.

Answer 1

Yes, the effect of a minor change in Saturn’s orbit would be a minor one though. However, if Venus, Mars, or Jupiter shifted in orbit then it could have serious impact on the earth.

Remember that Jupiter reaches all the way out to the orbit of Uranus to perturb the orbits of comets and asteroids causing them to come into the inner solar system. The effect on some thing as large as the earth, from that far away, would be minor but then a minor shift could mean the difference between life as we know it or a frigid hell or an area where we have tropical temperatures near the poles and worse at the equator. The earth is in a very good spot, just right for the life that has developed. We do have some orbital lea-way, but not that much which would make the earth still habitable, but not so nice for us.

It depends on the size of the orbital shift. All the planets orbit in a complex dance. Uranus and Pluto were discovered because they had a shift on the planet Saturn and even tiny Pluto still had a measurable effect.

Currently the planet hunters look at other stars for planets by detecting the slight wobble in a star's orbit. As that star's planets revolve they pull the star slightly out of position and we can detect that with powerful enough telescopes and so determine that a large planet orbits that sun.

Gravity is pretty powerful and a planet's orbit can be sensitive. An earth crossing asteroid isn't massive enough to change our orbit much, but it has a minor shift. In fact the satellites we launch to the outer planets take a very minor bit of the energy from the earth's orbit to propel them out into the outer solar system. We do that to save fuel and to allow us to launch deep space satellites without having to use a Saturn 5 booster rocket. Voyager stole a little orbital speed from; the earth, Venus, the sun, the Earth again, Jupiter and Saturn. Until last year with the New Horizons probe, Voyager was the fastest man made object ever. Most of that speed came from gravitational assist where it stole a tiny bit of orbital energy from the planets. Of course with the mass difference we would have to launch a few million satellites to have a noticeable difference on the earth’s orbit.

Answer 2

Suddenly changing the mass of Saturn would not affect its orbit at all. People seem to ask these kinds of questions all the time. They are all based on, dare I say, rather extreme ignorance of orbital mechanics. In fact, most of the answers are also based in extreme ignorance.

The real fact of the matter is that no disruptions are going to affect the Earth unless another planet comes VERY VERY close to us. Jupiter would have to get far closer to us than Mars in order to have any disruptive effect at all on the Earth. A planet the size of Mars would have to get within a few hundred thousand miles to have much effect.

Mind you, throw Jupiter into a chaotic orbit, and over the course of millions of years, it might slowly effect the rest of the solar system...but this would require some seriously close interactions between Jupiter and the other planets.

Answer 3

of course after a planet's disruption in orbit,it will find it's path in another orbit,i mean the focus lenght of the elliptical orbit will change,so if the path of the new orbit does'nt strike the earth's orbit it wont happen, if so it will strike it at most 4 points and the probability of the crash is'nt too much.
if the orbit be so close to the earth's they may have attraction effects on each other.

Answer 4

Probably. If you imagined something happening that would significantly alter the positions and movements of, let's say, Neptune and Triton, it would be something powerful enough to have some effect on most of the solar system. In all liklihood, anyway.

Or if it was something that only had large effects on the outer solar system, then the new positions and movements of the planets would still have some, perhaps rather small, effects on Earth's orbit.
The term is "perturbation".

Answer 5

no there would be no measurable effect, cause the suns gravity is dominating.

sometimes in the 1990's there was a lineup of all major planets which was feared by people causing severe floods and so on. nothing happened.

Take the Solar system
Remove Jupiter ... no effect to earth except that we might get peppered by some 'jobless asteroids' some time later ;)

Answer 6

Yes it most definitely would. It depends on how much of a scale were talking about. For instance if it's orbit were to increase or decrease by just a fraction, it's affects on earth would be so minute that it wouldn't even be calculable, but it would affect our orbit.

Answer 7

Fun discussion!

In my mind I look at it like magnets to study the fields and pull on objects so if the sun is a large magnet, and we are links held by magnetism, would losing the latter links affect the pull of the closer ones to the magnet.

I don't think it would but it's such an interesting question I think I'm going to go home and figure out how to measure the pull and see what I find out.

Answer 8

If what disrupted that planet was close enough to do the same or if the disrupted planet crashed into us.

Answer 9

yes it would