Billions of years in the future, Earth and Mars could smash into one-another. How and why could this colossal cosmic collision occur? And what does an extremely erratic pendulum have to do with the fate of the Earth?
Video chapters
00:00 Hello, Mars!
00:28 Simulating the Solar System
01:36 Two pendula are better than one
03:10 Chaos in the Solar System
06:08 Keep an eye on Mars…
Sources and further reading
This video is based on the results of this 2009 paper, enticingly entitled ‘Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth’: www.nature.com/articles/natur...
This is a great pop-science summary: science.howstuffworks.com/ear...
And this fantastic nerdy-but-readable essay by one of the authors of that paper goes into a lot more detail: arxiv.org/abs/1209.5996
The reason these long-run simulations of the Solar System are actually useful (reassuring though it is to double-check the Earth isn’t going to be destroyed in the next few million years) is because they allow us to estimate the Earth’s orbit into the geological past, and understand our past climate. This more recent paper actually does the reverse: ‘we recover precise and accurate values for the [orbits] of the inner planets from 223- to 199-million-year-old tropical lake sediments’. Amazing! www.pnas.org/content/116/22/1...
Errata
At 1:17, I say that there are ‘thousands’ of minor bodies, like moons, comets and asteroids…but I was swiftly corrected on Twitter! NASA says there are between 1.1 million and 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 km in the asteroid belt alone solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroid... and this amazing animation by @scottmanley charts our discovery of asteroids since 1970…in 8K • Asteroid Discovery - 1...
At 3:58, the text that appears next to Mercury says ‘Radius: 4880 km’. This should of course say ‘Diameter: 4880 km’, or it would be nearly as large as Earth! I say ‘Mercury is 4880 km across’, which is correct…
Credits
Many, many thanks to Tran Nguyen for filming this, particularly the opening and closing shots which were shot in the dead of night, in freezing temperatures!
Many thanks also to Tom Fuller for the beautifully subtle sound design. He also made the music for Invisible London, which you might enjoy: • The weird, invisible w... Listen to some of his music at / editar
And finally, extra thanks to my dad for making the wooden stand for the CHAOS PENDULUM and posting it to us during Lockdown 2!
Orbital integration code from github.com/hannorein/rebound
Thumbnail image adapted from commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... by Maggie (Margaret) Thompson, NASA’s Blue Marble visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/... and Mars by ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, CC BY-SA IGO 3.0 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Ima...
And finally…
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