Planets to collide?

Yet again I was browsing news stories, this time it was on YAHOO and stumbled across an article by Marlowe Hood, reporting on the possibility of the Earth colliding with the planet Venus. Don’t worry the study which was released Wednesday, June 10, 2009, states that this smash up may happen 3.5 billion years from now and the likelihood of such an event is one-in 2500. Personally I don’t find that ratio very comforting the though of the planets colliding is a little bit frightening, though the date is 3.5 billion years from now. The article also goes on to state that “there is a 99 percent chance that the Sun’s posse of planets will continue to circle in an orderly pattern throughout the expected life span of our life-giving star, another five billion years.” And that after that “the Sun will likely expand into a red giant, engulfing Earth and its other inner planets — Mercury, Venus and Mars — in the process.” I’ve heard about this theory before and that the sun will one day consume the planet. Recently Hollywood took this theory and in a simplified yet plausible version and incorporated it in the movie Knowing (*this is a spoiler if you had not yet seen the movie*), which related solar flares to the end of the Earth. In both theories the sun, which provides the energy for may daily processes on

Earth, will one ultimately destroy everything on Earth as well. 2012 anyone?

Predicting such events so far in time, has increasing become better for astronauts and scientists, who use methods such as Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and Mickael Gastineau generated numerical simulations to acquire knowledge of future celestial proceedings. The article states that “the researchers looked at 2,501 possible scenarios, 25 of which ended with a severely disrupted Solar System.” One researcher noted that during one of the runs the planet Mars passed very closely to Earth and that if Mars were to do that the planets would be torn apart and life, if still prominent, would “almost certainly cease to exist.”

In reading that article I found that the researchers computed mathematical equations producing results which were slightly changed or differentiated, creating new results. This process is much like that of what meteorologists use in which a equation is run though a computer, changed and produces different patterns which as slightly or greatly diverse. By doing this, forecasters and researchers can use the model runs to predict the movement of phenomena such as air masses, fronts and planetary orbits. That’s why Calculus and Physics is important in atmospheric research, you can’t divide math from science! The article went on the report that Mercury would be the first to disconnect itself from the planetary “normalcy”, because its smaller mass, stating that “At some point Mercury’s orbit would get into resonance with that of Jupiter, throwing the smaller orb even more out of kilter.”

Link to the article can be found here.