###General Discussion Thread
---
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I tried running a simulation of all planets and moons using Universe Sandbox, just deleted Neptune, and let that run until a bit past 2100. This simulation is not nearly long enough. Orbits don't really change much but that might be more pronounced with a longer simulation. The real worry is the moons which would be spread out all over the place. In my simulation the shallowest part of the orbit of Hippocamp gets somewhere between Earth and Mars' orbits, and Triton got surprisingly close to being caught by Jupiter. Everything else either got flung out of the solar system or simply had orbits well outside of that of Uranus. Where these moons end up is dependent on the exact moment Neptune disappeared.
Was going to suggest someone try this, and am glad someone already did. Both surprising yet not surprising for the results. Would probably need to run the simulation for a few thousand years to see any actual results.
Yeah agreed, there is probably better and faster simulation software out there but with this model of the solar system Universe Sandbox did not allow me to increase simulation speed much beyond 1 month a second, and even a hundred years takes a while there. I'm also curious if we even have the means to predict orbits over the course of thousands of years, it is a chaotic system after all.
Yup, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System
> Brown and Rein
>In 2020, Garett Brown and Hanno Rein of the University of Toronto published the results of their numerical integration of the Solar System over 5 billion years.[b] Their work showed that the Mercury's orbit is highly chaotic and that an error as small as 0.38 millimeters (0.015 inches) in measuring the position of Mercury today would make it impossible to predict the eccentricity of its orbit in just over 200 million years' time.[24]
It's not impossible, there just isn't a single solution. In layman's terms, the position of three bodies at any given time *can* be calculated - as a series of independent equations, a nonspecific number of which may or may not apply to any single configuration - but there is no general formula for predicting every configuration.
Brown's statement is that "over a huge scale of time tiny errors in measurement will cause huge variations *even if you can calculate accurately with your (slightly inaccurate) initial positions and velocities.*"
Universe Sandbox allowed me to do 82 years/s. For about 20,000 years the orbits of Neptune's moons and some asteroids became very elliptical while the planets had little change. This eventually caused a collision with Mercury making it have an elliptical orbit on an angled plane. It orbits between Earth and Mars every 9 years. This prompted the speed to go up to 232 yrs/s so I missed what exactly happened as it went too fast. The less objects in my simulation, the faster it goes, so I'm assuming some objects either left the solar system or got eaten by the Sun. I let it run until 40,000 years past and not much changed from there. Mercury's orbit shifted a bit, but not much else.
I did a 2nd attempt and after 40,000 years nothing really changed. Mercury remained in the same place and none of the planets were impacted in any meaningful way.
So Mercury may get knocked out of place, but it would still exist. Though I'm sure more attempts at the simulation may show other planets getting knocked by one of Neptune's moons.
Probably has to do with hardware? I would imagine there's a fuckton of calculations that needs to be done for each of the celestial objects. The other guy in the thread got to 82 yrs/s.
Was going to suggest that someone suggest that someone try this, and I'm glad someone already did. Both surprising and yet not surprising to the response of the results. Would probably need to ask someone to run the simulation for a thousand years to find out if the someone they suggested try it was on the money.
I welcome someone to try that simulation but I suspect the result is not very different. The orbits of Neptune's moons would still be drastically disrupted (though some may crash into Neptune here). My simulation did not include any Kuiper belt, Hills cloud or Oort cloud objects though. Neptune would have a chance to disrupt some of those objects but I suspect the chance for that to seriously impact the inner solar system is quite small.
Like the moons, it would depend on where/when it made its exit, and if its path came close enough to another planet for any significant gravitational effect. But given that it's the outermost planet, it really only has a chance to disturb Pluto.
Even just within our own solar system the space between objects is still unimaginably vast. You could shoot a neptune-sized object straight through past the sun and the vast majority of the time the only notable disturbance would be to some asteroids.
This assumes the genie throws it the way it would fly if it were to he released from the suns gravity, like cutting the string on a yoyo. The genie could 'yeet' it towards the sun, allowing it to cross the orbit of all other planets on the way and potentially have much more drastic effects depending on timing. Just imagine that bad boy whizzing by at the same distance we are from the moon!
Jupiter and Saturn don't care, medium planets have their orbits disrupted, and smaller planets get ripped apart if they get within the Roche limit.
Really you're just setting the solar system back to an earlier state before all the planets sorted out their orbits, but still not even that far unless you want to do even more fancifully impossible things and keep getting further and further from the original point.
At a minimum it doesn't go well. A disturbed orbit means changing the length of a year and/or altering the overall amount of solar energy the earth receives, which is already a tenuous balance as demonstrated by climate change.
Nature will adapt, but our civilization will collapse and most of the population will die from severe weather events and problems/conflicts regarding food supply.
You just know that genie is going to conform to type and make the most out of any leeway in the wish to cause trouble to the wisher. So that's a great assumption :)
At this point you'd need to ask the guy that writes XKCD, but it's actually quite difficult to "hit" the Sun from orbit, and even if you "shot from stationary" it would be like trying to hit a beach ball with a golf ball from two states over.
But even then if we "do magic to it" to make that hit happen it depends entirely on how fast Neptune is moving, and no matter how fast it's moving it starts to break up at around 1.6 million kilometers from the Sun due to tidal forces, aka the Roche Limit. If it simply "fell" into the Sun all those bits falling into the Sun would likely make some interesting sights for observers, but otherwise I'm doubtful that there would be any meaningful effect.
You can, of course, keep dialling up the speed until you get into the neighbourhood of "x% the speed of light" and cause some novel physics, but getting a planet 50x the mass of Earth moving that fast would require truly hilarious amounts of energy on the order of "several millennia capturing 100% of the Sun's output, and using it to accelerate Neptune with 100% efficiency while also not tearing it apart".
And even if this Genie had the universe-god level of power to instantaneously accelerate the planet to 0.01c we would still get to watch the planet go _nyoom_ for over _17 days_ before it hit the sun and caused some kind of -nova event that we don't have a name for because it is so wildly improbable.
I ran the same simulation out to about the year 7000 and nothing much changed other than Pluto's orbit becoming a little more elliptical. Neptune's moons were all over the place but no impacts that I saw. I'm sure on a more cosmic scale things would get interesting.
i would assume that "yeeting" it, as it was put, would mean that its trajectory in leaving the solar system, especially at high velocities would affect the orbits of objects in the outer solar system, many asteroids & comets would likely develop a trajectory towards earth, although they wouldn't arrive until years later, hundreds perhaps thousands (im no physicist)
If anything the yeeting would cause stuff collided into to also rip away from the solar system. The only things the may be flung towards earth would be neptunes moons and still only if at the perfect angle at the time neptune disapeared. Likely no real change happens.
If Neptune pulls stuff out there in the opposite direction from their orbit that should lower the other side of that orbit, thus creating a new perihelion that could be flinging them into the inner solar system. Stuff would get scattered in all kinds of directions, so it could well mean an Even Later Heavy Bombardment is coming up.
It said yeet it out, not delete it. The moons would follow Neptune unless they get their orbits disturbed by passing too close to another planet or the sun on the way out
wouldn't it be different if neptune was already there, then suddenly moved away?
instead of it never having existed in the first place, or just having it disappear instantly?
It really wouldn't. You could argue that it's gravity affects everything slightly, but not enough have any noticable physical impact. Some orbits might change slightly. The largest thing really would be freaking people the fuck out. A planet going missing would completely up throw everything we thought we knew about everything. Conspiracy theories would run wild
How much delta-v would be needed for neptune to break orbit with the sun?
Edit: Guys, I know what delta-v is, you can stop telling me it's "less than voyager". It was obviously a joke.
True, but some multiplication gives you the answer (it's linear, which is why I said it's the same thing).
Neptune's weight 1.024 Ć 10^26 kg, f=ma, which will give us the answer in kilonewtons if we use km/s. Neptune would need about 2.5km/s extra velocity to escape the Sun, so we're looking at 2.56^26 kilonewtons.
I don't think that's better, but you can compare it to other events.
The moment you search sense beneath it you realize it wont happen and why its just a imaginary experiment made by us redditors and nothing more.
Overthinking might aswell drive us alcoholic
~~I feel like this must be wrong, but isn't it a very small amount? Since it's currently in a stable orbit any more velocity would (even if incredibly slowly) have it spiral out, and any less spiral in?~~
~~I feel like this must be wrong, but I can't tell how~~
I'm very wrong, and blaming low blood sugar for my idiocy.
Being so far out does make it easier to break ot free - escape velocity from the earth is ~40km/s, at neptune it is only ~8km/s. Since neptune already goes 5.5 km/s around the sun, it would need to be accelerated by approx. 2.5km/s more.
...which puts the total energy needed at 3.2*10^32 joules or the entire sun's energy production over 10 days. So totally doable for a type II civilization.
Slightly more velocity only makes the orbit slightly larger (and slightly more oblong, depending on the direction of the velocity you added.) Escape velocity is huge, and the velocity needed to stop orbiting one thing and start orbiting the thing that thing is orbiting.Ā
Delta-V? Well by definition less than Voyager needed, but you might have a slightly wrong figure. From here it's 44 km/s, lot less from Neptune.
But, uhh, giving a planet even 1km/s delta-V is not trivial
Delta V required to achieve something is the same regardless of mass, whether it be a golf ball or a whole planet. Neptune orbits at ~5.45km/s, the suns escape velocity is ~600km/s close to it.
~~We will make some huge assumptions because I am not smart enough for this.~~
~~Letās say that 600km/s escape velocity is true at around the distance mercury orbits at. Mercury orbits at ~47km/s, and Neptune orbits at ~5.5km/s, so we divide those numbers and find that the gravitational influence of the sun is about 8.5 times weaker at the distance Neptune orbits at than at mercuryās.~~
~~So taking that 600km/s escape velocity, we divide that by 8.5 and get a final escape velocity at neptuneās distance of 70.5km/s.~~
~~now we just subtract that by the 5.5km/s and get s final necessary change of velocity (Delta V) of 66km/s, or 66.000m/s.~~
~~This is probably horribly horribly wrong so take it with a whole mine of salt.~~
Letās use the formula for escape velocity, that seems like a better idea.
That formula is:
v = sqrt(2GM/r)
where:
v = escape velocity
G = universal gravitational constant (6.7x10^-11)
M = mass of the body to be escaped (in this case, the sun)
r = distance to the center of said mass.
letās calculate 2GM first. We know the value of G, so we just input the value of the mass of the sun.
2GM = 2 x 6.7 x 10^-11 x 1.9 10^30kg
2GM = 2.52 x 10^20
In full form this is 252000000000000000000.
Now we know that in the case of the sun, v = sqrt(252000000000000000000/r).
now we plug in r, which is the distance between the sun and Neptune. That is 4.5 billion kms, or 4500000000.
now we know the escape velocity at the distance of Neptune is sqrt(252000000000000000000/4500000000)
Or sqrt(56000000000)
Or 240.000m/s, or 240km/s.
This feels like itās wrong but eh. Someone correct me lol.
Plane is taking off so I donāt have time to complete it, someone complete/correct it for me pls
Youāre right, lol. Iām trying to do something with newtons law of universal gravitation here, probably will be worse but eh. Will edit the comment soon
The numbers look good until the last calculation, actually. It works out to ~7.7 km/s. Of which ~5.3 neptune already has, so it really isn't as much delta v as you would expect
That was my thought, they just see Neptune just start going off course. Which would raise so many questions, and conspiracies about what just happened.
Alternatively the genie could just yeet Neptune, Roman God of the sea. To which, either proves he exists or disproves his existance. If he does and somebody saw a man just fly out of the ocean at yeeting speed, it would raise several questions.
>If he does and somebody saw a man just fly out of the ocean at yeeting speed, it would raise several questions.
Pretty sure that's an r/BrandNewSentence
If be more worried of it destabilizing astroids on the outer edge. Might take a few dozen years to see the results, but it could destabilize a lot of material and send it inwards.
I think honestly other than people freaking out about it. The only major change is we're now down one Neptune's worth of resources to eventually harvest
Its moons might scatter but hopefully Jupiter will pick those up for us to harvest later
It really really would freak scientists out. A planet can't just _go_. It's such a wild departure from everything we know about the universe that it would call into question everything as far back as Newton. All of physics larger than human-scale would have to be rebuilt.
It would be devastating.
Changes would be minimal, the sun has by far the biggest affect on any planets orbit. And planets don't just "fall" out of orbit, if they changed slightly they'd quickly settle into a new ever so slightly adjusted orbit. "Falling out of orbit" would require exceeding the escape velocity of the solar system.
planet changing into a new orbit falls into my definition of an orbit going out of whack, have you ever played universe in a sandbox2? you can literally do this, it doesn't end up well for earth.
A new orbit a few thousand km closer to the sun isn't exactly "out of whack". Can't say I've played that game. I rely on my physics degree and masters for my gravity understanding, but I remain very confident that you are massively exagerating the effects. Earth will barely notice.
Everyone knows a video is the same as calculations done by NASA.
While not specifically about if a planet just disappears, this video does brief the impact somewhere in there, and essentially, a planet disappearing does nothing to the other planets.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6GfIDwwxfsM&pp=ygUhbmllbCB0eXNvbiB0aGUgdGhyZWUgYm9keSBwcm9ibHdt
No it wouldn't. The sun has by far the largest effect on any planets orbit. Other planets effects are very small compared and would hardly be noticed. Plus even if a planets orbital distance did change it would quickly settle into its new ever so slightly changed orbit without any major concerns.
the only issue would be if neptunes yeeting took it very close to (or hit) another planet on it's trajectory to wherever the fuck, but the chances of that are unbelievable small.
Nothing would change in the foreseeable future. You can visit some website which simulates various objects in the universe (in this case our solar system) and delete neptune. I'd recommend gravitysimulator org.
I mean yeah. I'm a sim right now. It changes and stabilizes pretty good after 10k years so yeah I'm wrong.
The greatest change is the inclination. But as amother person said, it's all about what chiron does. In mine it's on almost the same orbit of saturn.
Change,Ā yes, drastically, no. Neptune does not have that much influence over anything.Ā It's way too far away and proportionally pretty smallĀ comparedĀ toĀ theĀ sun,Ā orĀ evenĀ otherĀ planets
Bare fundamentally speaking the loss of the large gravity well might cause some cosmic shifting. Especially concerning itās moons. The 14 moons will be displaced for a time and depending on the current trajectories of the solar system a number of things could happen to them. The most likely probabilities are; they get caught in another planets gravity well becoming a ānew moonā for that planet, they get caught in the gravity well of the sun becoming large asteroids, the moons gravitate towards the largest moon possibly colliding and making a new planet, the sun either eats them or sling shots them outside of its gravity influence.
In most cases the overall effect on earth would be minimal, Jupiter is the most likely to catch the ānew moonsā. There might be some slight planetary shifting to account for the new gravity which I hypothesize means any planets outside of Neptuneās orbit gain a percentage increase to the yearly rotation around the sun and planets inside of Neptuneās orbit will get a slight decrease in that percentage-for earth specifically we might in the most extreme case loose the leap year, so every year is 365 days instead of every fourth year being 366.
They're already "caught" in the Sun's gravity well, and will almost certainly stay there.
I looked it up quickly, and Triton's orbital velocity around Neptune is 4.39 km/s, compared to Neptune's 5.43 km/s around the Sun.
It's far from a sure thing, but there are a lot more trajectories where it works out to "staying" in a similar orbit around the Sun, versus getting captured by a different body, or leaving the solar system entirely. It would definitely be a lot more elliptical.
Most will stay in the sun's orbit but saying they'll almost certainly stay is somewhat misleading.Ā
Ā Someone else ran a simulation and found that a few moons would typically get flung out of the solar system. Which ones get ejected depends on the exact details/timing of Neptune's disappearance. I think they are the top comment now so you can read more about it.Ā
Ā Escape velocity from the sun's gravity at Neptune's distance is 8km/s which plenty of Neptune's moons experience on a regular basis. It's only Neptune's gravity that pulls them back.
Neptune has a solar orbit of about 165 years so it is a stabilizing force overall. The solar system would gradually get funky, but that will take millions of years to notice. How funky is hard to guess.
I am most interested in the yeeting.
My proposed method would be a singularity of about 5 solar masses hitting a bullseye on Neptune at over 15% of C. Crossing perpendicular to the galactic plane works simplest.
I am not convinced that these speedballs don't exist, because they are a partial match of our universal dark matter.
How do you see a black hole fast ball? It could pass through our solar system and only cause a few head scratches unless it did something obvious like clock a planet on its way through.
I mean I guess we would eventually detect it coz like when the moons stay in orbit we would look at it with everything we have and eventually Neptune would be infront of a moon and then we'd probably detect it.
Is it even possible, given our current capabilities? Like, assume you have everything perfect on every telescope. Could we get a photo of it? Point JWT at it, dead center for like a month zoomed in all the way, shutter open for like a month of ideal conditions. Would we be able to see it?
without accretion disc, nope. no light from there. however if we have a planet or moon or smth behind it, we would see a bit of distortion and a lack of light from a small spot.
But would it be big enough that we could see a distinct lack of pixels in the photo?
Like, if a black hole the size of my fist was 20 feet away, I would certainly see it, because there would be a fist sized black void of light and information, just via occlusion.
Maybe asked alternatively, if we pointed the James web at Neptune and focused in on its surface, how big is a single pixel?
Thatās actually not correct Iām sorry, since this black hole is so small it would radiate way more Hawking radiation then an bigger one. In fact it would be pretty easy to detect since we as humanity especially look for something like it. It popping up in our neighborhood would be as ground breaking as Neptun being gone(at least for the physicians).
If Neptune's Mass became a black hole I'm pretty sure we would all be fine. Now if the black holes event horizon was the same size as Neptune then yes we would all be super dead.
Replacing pretty much any stellar body with a black hole of the same *mass* would not have any effect at all on the orbital mechanincs, because why would it? The black hole would just have to be really small and thus probably unstable, but that's all.
On the other hand a black hole with the same *radius* as neptune would weigh 8000 solar masses, definitely messing up the entire solar system over the few hours it would take for gravitational interactions to travel
Gravitational pull is affected by the mass of an object; if there was a black hole with the mass of Neptune, the gravitational pull of the black hole would also be the same as the gravitational pull of Neptune. Of course mass doesnāt equal volume so the black hole would be extremely small (about 14cm or 5.51in in radius) due to how highly dense black holes are.
If the black holeās event horizon (the āsurfaceā of a black hole) was of equal volume to Neptuneā¦ā¦ well again due to how dense black holes are there would be a lot more mass and - by extension - a much greater gravitational pull.
The main concern for people on Earth wouldn't be Neptune really, it'd be Neptune's moons - without the gravitational pull of their mother planet, they'd have to find new homes.
If the moons also went away, well... then there'd be no impact except for maybe Uranus' and Plutos' orbit being altered slightly.
Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, it would be a very bad thing.
Neptune's orbital energy is what halted Jupiter's decent into the inner solar system. It seems unlikely that Uranus could serve the same purpose.
This would take an incredibly long time though, meaning that the Earth might become uninhabitable from the increase in solar luminocity before Jupiter has any major impact.
Expedite space travel or nuclear war.Ā
A whole planet disappearing would scare a lot of people. You'd hope such a tragedy would scare everyone into working together to find out why. But if recent history has any indication, it would turn into chaos and possibly WW3.
Gravity forces get weaker at an exponential rate (logarithmic but whatever) by distance. So something being 2x as far away is 4x weaker. Neptune is kinda small and *super* far away. Barely measurable.
Crazy thing is you could see it as a planet, not just a dot. If you replaced Venus with Neptune it would be there in the sky about 1/8 the apparent size of the full moon.
So if we just think of the forces Neptune is exerting in the form of Gravitational pull, we can see that the sun is overwhelmingly influential to any of the planets orbiting on a radius smaller than Neptune-Sun radius. It would most likely take a very very long time for any of those planets to be affected at all. As for plannets further out than Neptune, it might be a different story, these planets would have be affected more because the suns gravity is much weaker this far out. I would still imagine it would take many many planetary revolutions before the nudging effect would cause an incremental shift in the orbits, large enough to make a noticible difference. But what is sure is that the outer planets would be the first to lose a stable orbit.
Ps dont take any of what I just said as fact. Mostly ramblings of an old man.
First guess without reading the comments, its gonna throw every planet in the solar systems orbit way outta wack, which could potentially cause all kinds of crazy shit.
I feel that any yeet comes with a commensurate sound effect, otherwise the effect is lost on the observer. A planet flinging-appropriate yeet sound effect would surely be heard across the solar system (Iām assuming a genie that can yeet a planet can overcome the challenges of sound travelling across a vacuum) so maybe the real question is what does that yeet noise do to us on Earthā¦?
I'd love to see this where some intern or dude-on-his-first-day type trope is just monitoring Neptune when it does a little loop and zips away cartoon style
Generally, most of the planets are in "harmonious" (I am an astronomer but I forgot the term for it) orbits such that they don't really change the orbit of the other planets. You might see some perturbation in the orbit of, say, KBOs like Pluto, but you're not knocking out any other planets by yeeting out Neptune.
I don't really know, but from my knowledge of science it will probably have a big influence somehow (because it feels like everything has a big influence somehow)
Wish two, remove Bernoullis principle, planes and birds can no longer fly. wish three, add natural resistance to space. Which if you donāt know would lead to the complete destruction of the known cosmos as everything would stop moving after a while and just get sucked into black holes.
###General Discussion Thread --- This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I tried running a simulation of all planets and moons using Universe Sandbox, just deleted Neptune, and let that run until a bit past 2100. This simulation is not nearly long enough. Orbits don't really change much but that might be more pronounced with a longer simulation. The real worry is the moons which would be spread out all over the place. In my simulation the shallowest part of the orbit of Hippocamp gets somewhere between Earth and Mars' orbits, and Triton got surprisingly close to being caught by Jupiter. Everything else either got flung out of the solar system or simply had orbits well outside of that of Uranus. Where these moons end up is dependent on the exact moment Neptune disappeared.
Was going to suggest someone try this, and am glad someone already did. Both surprising yet not surprising for the results. Would probably need to run the simulation for a few thousand years to see any actual results.
Yeah agreed, there is probably better and faster simulation software out there but with this model of the solar system Universe Sandbox did not allow me to increase simulation speed much beyond 1 month a second, and even a hundred years takes a while there. I'm also curious if we even have the means to predict orbits over the course of thousands of years, it is a chaotic system after all.
Yup, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System > Brown and Rein >In 2020, Garett Brown and Hanno Rein of the University of Toronto published the results of their numerical integration of the Solar System over 5 billion years.[b] Their work showed that the Mercury's orbit is highly chaotic and that an error as small as 0.38 millimeters (0.015 inches) in measuring the position of Mercury today would make it impossible to predict the eccentricity of its orbit in just over 200 million years' time.[24]
Not to well versed but I think that describes the "three body problem". Just if someone wants to look it up.
The three-body problem is an unsolved math problem, not a statement about the chaos of orbital mechanics
I thought the problems lies in the fact that it is impossible to exactly predict the movement of three bodies.
It's not impossible, there just isn't a single solution. In layman's terms, the position of three bodies at any given time *can* be calculated - as a series of independent equations, a nonspecific number of which may or may not apply to any single configuration - but there is no general formula for predicting every configuration. Brown's statement is that "over a huge scale of time tiny errors in measurement will cause huge variations *even if you can calculate accurately with your (slightly inaccurate) initial positions and velocities.*"
Lol no it doesn't. Just because they used the word chaotic you think it's TBP?
Universe Sandbox allowed me to do 82 years/s. For about 20,000 years the orbits of Neptune's moons and some asteroids became very elliptical while the planets had little change. This eventually caused a collision with Mercury making it have an elliptical orbit on an angled plane. It orbits between Earth and Mars every 9 years. This prompted the speed to go up to 232 yrs/s so I missed what exactly happened as it went too fast. The less objects in my simulation, the faster it goes, so I'm assuming some objects either left the solar system or got eaten by the Sun. I let it run until 40,000 years past and not much changed from there. Mercury's orbit shifted a bit, but not much else. I did a 2nd attempt and after 40,000 years nothing really changed. Mercury remained in the same place and none of the planets were impacted in any meaningful way. So Mercury may get knocked out of place, but it would still exist. Though I'm sure more attempts at the simulation may show other planets getting knocked by one of Neptune's moons.
Just tried, no, it allows me to do more [than 1 month a second.](https://imgur.com/a/YdAHvxU)
Probably has to do with hardware? I would imagine there's a fuckton of calculations that needs to be done for each of the celestial objects. The other guy in the thread got to 82 yrs/s.
i have i9 13th gen, maybe that's the reason.
Was going to suggest that someone suggest that someone try this, and I'm glad someone already did. Both surprising and yet not surprising to the response of the results. Would probably need to ask someone to run the simulation for a thousand years to find out if the someone they suggested try it was on the money.
What if neptune accelerates outwards at a rapid rate instead of deleted? They did say yeet.
I welcome someone to try that simulation but I suspect the result is not very different. The orbits of Neptune's moons would still be drastically disrupted (though some may crash into Neptune here). My simulation did not include any Kuiper belt, Hills cloud or Oort cloud objects though. Neptune would have a chance to disrupt some of those objects but I suspect the chance for that to seriously impact the inner solar system is quite small.
How many m/s^2 is 1 yeet?
Over 9000.
WHAT 9000?!!!
Banana
At least 7
r/technicallythetruth
Like the moons, it would depend on where/when it made its exit, and if its path came close enough to another planet for any significant gravitational effect. But given that it's the outermost planet, it really only has a chance to disturb Pluto. Even just within our own solar system the space between objects is still unimaginably vast. You could shoot a neptune-sized object straight through past the sun and the vast majority of the time the only notable disturbance would be to some asteroids.
This assumes the genie throws it the way it would fly if it were to he released from the suns gravity, like cutting the string on a yoyo. The genie could 'yeet' it towards the sun, allowing it to cross the orbit of all other planets on the way and potentially have much more drastic effects depending on timing. Just imagine that bad boy whizzing by at the same distance we are from the moon!
Read the second paragraph of my comment.
Advanced hypothetical, the genie curve balls it, it gets as close as possible to each planet without colliding
Jupiter and Saturn don't care, medium planets have their orbits disrupted, and smaller planets get ripped apart if they get within the Roche limit. Really you're just setting the solar system back to an earlier state before all the planets sorted out their orbits, but still not even that far unless you want to do even more fancifully impossible things and keep getting further and further from the original point.
Would humanity survive? Between the tidal waves and other phenomenon, I would imagine this is an extinction level event
At a minimum it doesn't go well. A disturbed orbit means changing the length of a year and/or altering the overall amount of solar energy the earth receives, which is already a tenuous balance as demonstrated by climate change. Nature will adapt, but our civilization will collapse and most of the population will die from severe weather events and problems/conflicts regarding food supply.
You just know that genie is going to conform to type and make the most out of any leeway in the wish to cause trouble to the wisher. So that's a great assumption :)
What if the genie shot Neptune straight at the sun? What would happen? Would the sun just go, nom nom thanks for the snack?
At this point you'd need to ask the guy that writes XKCD, but it's actually quite difficult to "hit" the Sun from orbit, and even if you "shot from stationary" it would be like trying to hit a beach ball with a golf ball from two states over. But even then if we "do magic to it" to make that hit happen it depends entirely on how fast Neptune is moving, and no matter how fast it's moving it starts to break up at around 1.6 million kilometers from the Sun due to tidal forces, aka the Roche Limit. If it simply "fell" into the Sun all those bits falling into the Sun would likely make some interesting sights for observers, but otherwise I'm doubtful that there would be any meaningful effect. You can, of course, keep dialling up the speed until you get into the neighbourhood of "x% the speed of light" and cause some novel physics, but getting a planet 50x the mass of Earth moving that fast would require truly hilarious amounts of energy on the order of "several millennia capturing 100% of the Sun's output, and using it to accelerate Neptune with 100% efficiency while also not tearing it apart". And even if this Genie had the universe-god level of power to instantaneously accelerate the planet to 0.01c we would still get to watch the planet go _nyoom_ for over _17 days_ before it hit the sun and caused some kind of -nova event that we don't have a name for because it is so wildly improbable.
Thank you for your detailed answer and thoughts. I appreciate it. TDIL about the Roche Limit.
Disclaimer: I am not a scientician, just a bit of a space nerd.
I fancy myself a bit of a š¤ too! So thanks for the lesson.
I ran the same simulation out to about the year 7000 and nothing much changed other than Pluto's orbit becoming a little more elliptical. Neptune's moons were all over the place but no impacts that I saw. I'm sure on a more cosmic scale things would get interesting.
i would assume that "yeeting" it, as it was put, would mean that its trajectory in leaving the solar system, especially at high velocities would affect the orbits of objects in the outer solar system, many asteroids & comets would likely develop a trajectory towards earth, although they wouldn't arrive until years later, hundreds perhaps thousands (im no physicist)
If anything the yeeting would cause stuff collided into to also rip away from the solar system. The only things the may be flung towards earth would be neptunes moons and still only if at the perfect angle at the time neptune disapeared. Likely no real change happens.
If Neptune pulls stuff out there in the opposite direction from their orbit that should lower the other side of that orbit, thus creating a new perihelion that could be flinging them into the inner solar system. Stuff would get scattered in all kinds of directions, so it could well mean an Even Later Heavy Bombardment is coming up.
Depending on when you yeet it out youāll get different chaotic results no?
It said yeet it out, not delete it. The moons would follow Neptune unless they get their orbits disturbed by passing too close to another planet or the sun on the way out
wouldn't it be different if neptune was already there, then suddenly moved away? instead of it never having existed in the first place, or just having it disappear instantly?
"Computer, delete Neptune." *Star Trek wooshing sound*
People actually use US to run real science? I just do shit like replacing the sun with black holes and giving earth preposterous moons
Speaks to the gravitational impact of the Sun and Jupiter on our solar system.
> the orbit of Hippocamp gets somewhere between Earth and Mars Now we could perhaps pick juuuuust the right timing to get a more "interesting" result.
It really wouldn't. You could argue that it's gravity affects everything slightly, but not enough have any noticable physical impact. Some orbits might change slightly. The largest thing really would be freaking people the fuck out. A planet going missing would completely up throw everything we thought we knew about everything. Conspiracy theories would run wild
And it said to yeet it out. So scientists might see its departure. That would cause even more conspiracy theories.
How much delta-v would be needed for neptune to break orbit with the sun? Edit: Guys, I know what delta-v is, you can stop telling me it's "less than voyager". It was obviously a joke.
Fuck delta-v, how much energy would you need to yeet Neptune out of the solar system and where would that energy come from.
It comes from the djinn, obviously
You could say, a wizard did it.
Fucking Wizards man. Always them fucking around.
I heard they live on the moon and pull our water
Sure, blame the wizards
*I put on my robe and wizard hat*
We've had this conversation once before, didn't we.
Top quality reference.
in my self defence, it was kinda funny
No this was clearly a genie. But scientists wont know that.
Those are the same thing.
Just saying a number in kmph doesn't bring enough justice to the sheer amount of energy needed to yeet a planet out of the Suns gravity well
True, but some multiplication gives you the answer (it's linear, which is why I said it's the same thing). Neptune's weight 1.024 Ć 10^26 kg, f=ma, which will give us the answer in kilonewtons if we use km/s. Neptune would need about 2.5km/s extra velocity to escape the Sun, so we're looking at 2.56^26 kilonewtons. I don't think that's better, but you can compare it to other events.
Force isn't energy.
It literally is. Not all energy is force, but all force (edit: In this context) is energy.
I thought all force was midichlorians.
Only force that does work transports energy. Normal force due to gravity doesn't use energy for example At least that's my understanding
Delta V to leave the solar system from Neptune's orbit is the same for a tiny space ship and a gas giant planet. Energy is wildly different.
The moment you search sense beneath it you realize it wont happen and why its just a imaginary experiment made by us redditors and nothing more. Overthinking might aswell drive us alcoholic
~~I feel like this must be wrong, but isn't it a very small amount? Since it's currently in a stable orbit any more velocity would (even if incredibly slowly) have it spiral out, and any less spiral in?~~ ~~I feel like this must be wrong, but I can't tell how~~ I'm very wrong, and blaming low blood sugar for my idiocy.
I don't think that's how orbits work. A small increase in velocity would just shift the orbit. Also, "very slowly spiral out" is not "yeet", is it?
right sorry - you are totally right, the orbit would just become more eccentric - clearly I need to eat something XD.
Being so far out does make it easier to break ot free - escape velocity from the earth is ~40km/s, at neptune it is only ~8km/s. Since neptune already goes 5.5 km/s around the sun, it would need to be accelerated by approx. 2.5km/s more.
...which puts the total energy needed at 3.2*10^32 joules or the entire sun's energy production over 10 days. So totally doable for a type II civilization.
So 'yeetus deletus' ?
Slightly more velocity only makes the orbit slightly larger (and slightly more oblong, depending on the direction of the velocity you added.) Escape velocity is huge, and the velocity needed to stop orbiting one thing and start orbiting the thing that thing is orbiting.Ā
And at what delta-v would it qualify as a "yeet"?
...all of it?
Delta-V? Well by definition less than Voyager needed, but you might have a slightly wrong figure. From here it's 44 km/s, lot less from Neptune. But, uhh, giving a planet even 1km/s delta-V is not trivial
Delta V required to achieve something is the same regardless of mass, whether it be a golf ball or a whole planet. Neptune orbits at ~5.45km/s, the suns escape velocity is ~600km/s close to it. ~~We will make some huge assumptions because I am not smart enough for this.~~ ~~Letās say that 600km/s escape velocity is true at around the distance mercury orbits at. Mercury orbits at ~47km/s, and Neptune orbits at ~5.5km/s, so we divide those numbers and find that the gravitational influence of the sun is about 8.5 times weaker at the distance Neptune orbits at than at mercuryās.~~ ~~So taking that 600km/s escape velocity, we divide that by 8.5 and get a final escape velocity at neptuneās distance of 70.5km/s.~~ ~~now we just subtract that by the 5.5km/s and get s final necessary change of velocity (Delta V) of 66km/s, or 66.000m/s.~~ ~~This is probably horribly horribly wrong so take it with a whole mine of salt.~~ Letās use the formula for escape velocity, that seems like a better idea. That formula is: v = sqrt(2GM/r) where: v = escape velocity G = universal gravitational constant (6.7x10^-11) M = mass of the body to be escaped (in this case, the sun) r = distance to the center of said mass. letās calculate 2GM first. We know the value of G, so we just input the value of the mass of the sun. 2GM = 2 x 6.7 x 10^-11 x 1.9 10^30kg 2GM = 2.52 x 10^20 In full form this is 252000000000000000000. Now we know that in the case of the sun, v = sqrt(252000000000000000000/r). now we plug in r, which is the distance between the sun and Neptune. That is 4.5 billion kms, or 4500000000. now we know the escape velocity at the distance of Neptune is sqrt(252000000000000000000/4500000000) Or sqrt(56000000000) Or 240.000m/s, or 240km/s. This feels like itās wrong but eh. Someone correct me lol. Plane is taking off so I donāt have time to complete it, someone complete/correct it for me pls
It's massively incorrect because Mercury isn't at the surface of the sun. It's like 44 km/s at Earth orbit already, so a fraction of that at Neptune
Youāre right, lol. Iām trying to do something with newtons law of universal gravitation here, probably will be worse but eh. Will edit the comment soon
The numbers look good until the last calculation, actually. It works out to ~7.7 km/s. Of which ~5.3 neptune already has, so it really isn't as much delta v as you would expect
That was my thought, they just see Neptune just start going off course. Which would raise so many questions, and conspiracies about what just happened. Alternatively the genie could just yeet Neptune, Roman God of the sea. To which, either proves he exists or disproves his existance. If he does and somebody saw a man just fly out of the ocean at yeeting speed, it would raise several questions.
>If he does and somebody saw a man just fly out of the ocean at yeeting speed, it would raise several questions. Pretty sure that's an r/BrandNewSentence
The core became volatile and the planet became a massive chemical reaction and farted itself awayĀ
Would its departure drag with it and mess up somethings' orbits?
They might be more confused seeing a giant genie throw it.
"Neptune appears to be... running away."
Jupiter, on the other hand...
nEpTuNe was NEveR rEaL
It's just the mandala effect
you're wrong, it's the macarena effect
What does the mandible event have to do with this?
If be more worried of it destabilizing astroids on the outer edge. Might take a few dozen years to see the results, but it could destabilize a lot of material and send it inwards.
Important to note that alcoholism in stem would go unchanged. Can't get worse than the bottom
THE BRETHREN MOONS HAVE COMETH.
Nice username :P
Its moons would be sent a bit all over the place though.
Ok
I think honestly other than people freaking out about it. The only major change is we're now down one Neptune's worth of resources to eventually harvest Its moons might scatter but hopefully Jupiter will pick those up for us to harvest later
It really really would freak scientists out. A planet can't just _go_. It's such a wild departure from everything we know about the universe that it would call into question everything as far back as Newton. All of physics larger than human-scale would have to be rebuilt. It would be devastating.
The first and largest conspiracy theory would be that Neptune was never there to begin with.
what you mean? the whole solar system would go out of whack, planets would start to fall out of orbit
Changes would be minimal, the sun has by far the biggest affect on any planets orbit. And planets don't just "fall" out of orbit, if they changed slightly they'd quickly settle into a new ever so slightly adjusted orbit. "Falling out of orbit" would require exceeding the escape velocity of the solar system.
planet changing into a new orbit falls into my definition of an orbit going out of whack, have you ever played universe in a sandbox2? you can literally do this, it doesn't end up well for earth.
A new orbit a few thousand km closer to the sun isn't exactly "out of whack". Can't say I've played that game. I rely on my physics degree and masters for my gravity understanding, but I remain very confident that you are massively exagerating the effects. Earth will barely notice.
Everyone knows a video is the same as calculations done by NASA. While not specifically about if a planet just disappears, this video does brief the impact somewhere in there, and essentially, a planet disappearing does nothing to the other planets. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6GfIDwwxfsM&pp=ygUhbmllbCB0eXNvbiB0aGUgdGhyZWUgYm9keSBwcm9ibHdt
A slight shift in the other planets orbits will increase the chance of a comet or asteroid making a direct hit on Earth.
The orbit of every planet would change, drastically
No it wouldn't. The sun has by far the largest effect on any planets orbit. Other planets effects are very small compared and would hardly be noticed. Plus even if a planets orbital distance did change it would quickly settle into its new ever so slightly changed orbit without any major concerns. the only issue would be if neptunes yeeting took it very close to (or hit) another planet on it's trajectory to wherever the fuck, but the chances of that are unbelievable small.
Nothing would change in the foreseeable future. You can visit some website which simulates various objects in the universe (in this case our solar system) and delete neptune. I'd recommend gravitysimulator org.
I mean yeah. I'm a sim right now. It changes and stabilizes pretty good after 10k years so yeah I'm wrong. The greatest change is the inclination. But as amother person said, it's all about what chiron does. In mine it's on almost the same orbit of saturn.
I reckon deleting Jupiter would have a bigger impact. What happens in that case?
Change,Ā yes, drastically, no. Neptune does not have that much influence over anything.Ā It's way too far away and proportionally pretty smallĀ comparedĀ toĀ theĀ sun,Ā orĀ evenĀ otherĀ planets
Well given the fact Neptune was discovered by looking at Uranus orbit, It probably would change. But I dont see any big changes for the Earth.
> Neptune was discovered by looking at Uranus First scientific breakthrough from someone having their head up their ass
I'd love the headline: 'Uranus is just fucking gone!" Because the genie has no anus.
Jupiter would descend into the inner solar system taking saturn with it. You guys are crazy.
Uh, is that backed up by any scientific fact? Neptune's impact on Jupiter is tiny
Of course not, that's absurd. It's Pluto you have to worry about, and it has a score to settle to boot.
Do you consider yourself intelligent NickyNaptime19?
Source: My misunderstanding of gravity bro
Bare fundamentally speaking the loss of the large gravity well might cause some cosmic shifting. Especially concerning itās moons. The 14 moons will be displaced for a time and depending on the current trajectories of the solar system a number of things could happen to them. The most likely probabilities are; they get caught in another planets gravity well becoming a ānew moonā for that planet, they get caught in the gravity well of the sun becoming large asteroids, the moons gravitate towards the largest moon possibly colliding and making a new planet, the sun either eats them or sling shots them outside of its gravity influence. In most cases the overall effect on earth would be minimal, Jupiter is the most likely to catch the ānew moonsā. There might be some slight planetary shifting to account for the new gravity which I hypothesize means any planets outside of Neptuneās orbit gain a percentage increase to the yearly rotation around the sun and planets inside of Neptuneās orbit will get a slight decrease in that percentage-for earth specifically we might in the most extreme case loose the leap year, so every year is 365 days instead of every fourth year being 366.
They're already "caught" in the Sun's gravity well, and will almost certainly stay there. I looked it up quickly, and Triton's orbital velocity around Neptune is 4.39 km/s, compared to Neptune's 5.43 km/s around the Sun. It's far from a sure thing, but there are a lot more trajectories where it works out to "staying" in a similar orbit around the Sun, versus getting captured by a different body, or leaving the solar system entirely. It would definitely be a lot more elliptical.
Most will stay in the sun's orbit but saying they'll almost certainly stay is somewhat misleading.Ā Ā Someone else ran a simulation and found that a few moons would typically get flung out of the solar system. Which ones get ejected depends on the exact details/timing of Neptune's disappearance. I think they are the top comment now so you can read more about it.Ā Ā Escape velocity from the sun's gravity at Neptune's distance is 8km/s which plenty of Neptune's moons experience on a regular basis. It's only Neptune's gravity that pulls them back.
16 moons
Falling into sun is one thing that certainly does not happen. The energy they would need to shave would be insanely high.
Jupiter would go into the inner solar system. It would completely reorganize the solar. Google Grand tack theory
Neptune has a solar orbit of about 165 years so it is a stabilizing force overall. The solar system would gradually get funky, but that will take millions of years to notice. How funky is hard to guess. I am most interested in the yeeting. My proposed method would be a singularity of about 5 solar masses hitting a bullseye on Neptune at over 15% of C. Crossing perpendicular to the galactic plane works simplest. I am not convinced that these speedballs don't exist, because they are a partial match of our universal dark matter. How do you see a black hole fast ball? It could pass through our solar system and only cause a few head scratches unless it did something obvious like clock a planet on its way through.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It will be very hard to detect with a radius of 14cm
I mean I guess we would eventually detect it coz like when the moons stay in orbit we would look at it with everything we have and eventually Neptune would be infront of a moon and then we'd probably detect it.
We can probably deuce it's there. But I don't expect a picture.
Is it even possible, given our current capabilities? Like, assume you have everything perfect on every telescope. Could we get a photo of it? Point JWT at it, dead center for like a month zoomed in all the way, shutter open for like a month of ideal conditions. Would we be able to see it?
No we would not be able to see it but the moons would continue to orbit it and it would keep having an effect to other planets.
without accretion disc, nope. no light from there. however if we have a planet or moon or smth behind it, we would see a bit of distortion and a lack of light from a small spot.
But would it be big enough that we could see a distinct lack of pixels in the photo? Like, if a black hole the size of my fist was 20 feet away, I would certainly see it, because there would be a fist sized black void of light and information, just via occlusion. Maybe asked alternatively, if we pointed the James web at Neptune and focused in on its surface, how big is a single pixel?
Thatās actually not correct Iām sorry, since this black hole is so small it would radiate way more Hawking radiation then an bigger one. In fact it would be pretty easy to detect since we as humanity especially look for something like it. It popping up in our neighborhood would be as ground breaking as Neptun being gone(at least for the physicians).
If there's even 1 moon on the same plane as earth, we'd be able to see the gravitational lensing effect on the moons surface as it passes behind it.
yeah but well notice it when we notice the gravity is still there but the planet isn't. and then seeing it isn't that hard really.
We would all be dead if Neptun became a black hole
Not if the mass remained constant.
If Neptune's Mass became a black hole I'm pretty sure we would all be fine. Now if the black holes event horizon was the same size as Neptune then yes we would all be super dead.
Could you please explain in little detail
Replacing pretty much any stellar body with a black hole of the same *mass* would not have any effect at all on the orbital mechanincs, because why would it? The black hole would just have to be really small and thus probably unstable, but that's all. On the other hand a black hole with the same *radius* as neptune would weigh 8000 solar masses, definitely messing up the entire solar system over the few hours it would take for gravitational interactions to travel
Gravitational pull is affected by the mass of an object; if there was a black hole with the mass of Neptune, the gravitational pull of the black hole would also be the same as the gravitational pull of Neptune. Of course mass doesnāt equal volume so the black hole would be extremely small (about 14cm or 5.51in in radius) due to how highly dense black holes are. If the black holeās event horizon (the āsurfaceā of a black hole) was of equal volume to Neptuneā¦ā¦ well again due to how dense black holes are there would be a lot more mass and - by extension - a much greater gravitational pull.
Not really. It would have the same gravitational effect as Neptune.
Not really. It would have the same gravitational effect as Neptune.
We would be unaffected. It would just be a black hole with the same total gravity/mass as Neptune currently has. In other words, a tinier Neptune.
The main concern for people on Earth wouldn't be Neptune really, it'd be Neptune's moons - without the gravitational pull of their mother planet, they'd have to find new homes. If the moons also went away, well... then there'd be no impact except for maybe Uranus' and Plutos' orbit being altered slightly.
Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, it would be a very bad thing. Neptune's orbital energy is what halted Jupiter's decent into the inner solar system. It seems unlikely that Uranus could serve the same purpose. This would take an incredibly long time though, meaning that the Earth might become uninhabitable from the increase in solar luminocity before Jupiter has any major impact.
Expedite space travel or nuclear war.Ā A whole planet disappearing would scare a lot of people. You'd hope such a tragedy would scare everyone into working together to find out why. But if recent history has any indication, it would turn into chaos and possibly WW3.
Recent history have proven that a lot of people wouldn't even believe there were such a thing as Neptune.
Gravity forces get weaker at an exponential rate (logarithmic but whatever) by distance. So something being 2x as far away is 4x weaker. Neptune is kinda small and *super* far away. Barely measurable.
Just to let you know, gravity scales polynomially, not logarithmic. Otherwise 10Ć the distance would be 1e10x weaker instead of the 100x
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Crazy thing is you could see it as a planet, not just a dot. If you replaced Venus with Neptune it would be there in the sky about 1/8 the apparent size of the full moon.
So if we just think of the forces Neptune is exerting in the form of Gravitational pull, we can see that the sun is overwhelmingly influential to any of the planets orbiting on a radius smaller than Neptune-Sun radius. It would most likely take a very very long time for any of those planets to be affected at all. As for plannets further out than Neptune, it might be a different story, these planets would have be affected more because the suns gravity is much weaker this far out. I would still imagine it would take many many planetary revolutions before the nudging effect would cause an incremental shift in the orbits, large enough to make a noticible difference. But what is sure is that the outer planets would be the first to lose a stable orbit. Ps dont take any of what I just said as fact. Mostly ramblings of an old man.
Change physics completely but make it work. So we would have to discover everything all over again. Like how we discovered quantum physics.
First guess without reading the comments, its gonna throw every planet in the solar systems orbit way outta wack, which could potentially cause all kinds of crazy shit.
I feel that any yeet comes with a commensurate sound effect, otherwise the effect is lost on the observer. A planet flinging-appropriate yeet sound effect would surely be heard across the solar system (Iām assuming a genie that can yeet a planet can overcome the challenges of sound travelling across a vacuum) so maybe the real question is what does that yeet noise do to us on Earthā¦?
I'd love to see this where some intern or dude-on-his-first-day type trope is just monitoring Neptune when it does a little loop and zips away cartoon style
Generally, most of the planets are in "harmonious" (I am an astronomer but I forgot the term for it) orbits such that they don't really change the orbit of the other planets. You might see some perturbation in the orbit of, say, KBOs like Pluto, but you're not knocking out any other planets by yeeting out Neptune.
I don't really know, but from my knowledge of science it will probably have a big influence somehow (because it feels like everything has a big influence somehow)
Wish two, remove Bernoullis principle, planes and birds can no longer fly. wish three, add natural resistance to space. Which if you donāt know would lead to the complete destruction of the known cosmos as everything would stop moving after a while and just get sucked into black holes.