Disappearing Planet

[Kathara_Khan]

I'm hoping someone smarter and more knowledgeable than me could shed some light on this for me.

What would happen to a solar system if one of it's gas giants disappeared?

Like, if Jupiter suddenly disappeared from our solar system?

And I don't mean "disappear" like "got blown up by the Death Star". Rather honest to Eris, one second it's there, blink, and it's gone, poof, evaporated without a trace into thin air (or vacuum as the case may be here).

What would the effects on the solar system be?

Obviously(?), any moons the gas giant happened to have would go flying off. The chance of them colliding with anything else in the system wouldn't be all that high, but not non-existant. I'm gussing.

What beyond that?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Kathara_Khan

What would the effects on the solar system be?

Obviously(?), any moons the gas giant happened to have would go flying off. The chance of them colliding with anything else in the system wouldn't be all that high, but not non-existant. I'm gussing.

What beyond that?

Short term, nothing very much. The only effect of the gas giants other than on their moons is slight perturbations of various orbits that tend to produce slow and not very marked cycles in the orbital elements of other things. If Jupiter vanished Earth's Milankovitch cycles would be different in some way, but we would still have Milankovitch cycles and our long-term climatic averages would be the same. The Jupiter Trojan asteroids would very gradually drift into more scattered orbits.

You raise an interesting point about the moons flying off. If Earth vanished Luna would remain in an orbit around the Sun not much different from Earth's orbit, because its orbital velocity around Earth is small compared to Earth's orbital speed around the Sun. But in the case of the Jovian moons, the orbital speed of some of the inner ones is significantly larger that Jupiter's orbital speed around the Sun. Which means that depending on where they were at the time of the vanishing they could find themselves on anything from a hyperbolic escape orbit to a retrograde orbit. I reckon that all out to Callisto are moving faster enough that they might end up about anywhere in the ecliptic plane.

[Edges]

More meteors.

Jupiter is a pretty good dust mop for the solar system.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by Edges

Jupiter is a pretty good dust mop for the solar system.

Yes and no: Jupiter is also what kicks debris from the asteroid belt (i.e., meteors) into Earth-crossing orbits.

[Kathara_Khan]

So, the effect would be alltogether pretty minor, especially in short term, got it.

There would be no huge cataclysm (unless one of the orphan moons actually hit something important), which was the main thing I wanted to make sure about.

Thank you for the help.

[Anaraxes]

No "This is Ceti Alpha Five!" moment, no. Even if your name is Khan :)

[Agemegos]

Astrologers would continue to treat Jupiter as being there…

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Astrologers would continue to treat Jupiter as being there…

I don't think they've corrected for earth's precession's inclusion of a 13th zodiac, so what's a missing planet or two?

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Astrologers would continue to treat Jupiter as being there…

*scrunch* An astrology thread cross-post?

I dunno about the solar system, but I imagine there'd be some consternation here on Earth.

[panton41]

There's a game on Steam called "Universe Sandbox" where you can take a model of the Solar System, remove Jupiter and see what happens.

The answer (in the short term of a few simulated years) is not much...