Member-only story

What would happen to earth if each planet of the solar system were to be removed one at a time?

Giuseppe Frisella
2 min readSep 1, 2023

--

In most cases, almost nothing would happen to Earth.

Mercury and Venus are too small and distant to have any influence on other celestial bodies, and the same applies to the Earth itself.

On the other hand, our planet would benefit from the absence of Mars because its gravitational field sends many bodies from the asteroid belt to Earth via the slingshot effect (or gravity assist), so without it, Earth would be safer.

With Jupiter, the story changes. Its mass is three times that of all the other planets put together, and if it were to disappear, a lot of matter in the asteroid belt would be drawn towards the sun. And even after the first shower of asteroids on Earth, the entire solar system would now be more vulnerable to rogue celestial bodies, previously deflected or attracted by Jupiter. The orbits of the other planets may also undergo minor changes.

Without Saturn and Uranus, the orbits of the more distant gaseous planets would only change slightly, while the absence of Neptune would destabilize the orbits of many planetoids and asteroids in the Kuiper belt.

The absence of Jupiter would therefore be the only problematic change, while the absence of Mars would even benefit the Earth. All other bodies have almost no influence. Except for the Moon, which, if it weren’t there, would cause the Earth to tilt, disrupt the seasons’ cycle, the weather, and speed up the Earth’s rotation, causing a day to last six to 12 hours.

--

--

Giuseppe Frisella
Giuseppe Frisella

Written by Giuseppe Frisella

I'm a curious person and I'm on Medium mainly to read and share thoughts and knowledge. I love science, especially physics and evolutionary biology.

No responses yet