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You Can Relax. Mercury Isn't Going to Crash into Earth
It probably wasn't keeping you up at night, nor anywhere on your list of worries.
But some astronomers had predicted that Mercury would go Rogue, leave its orbit and come crashing into earth in the distant future.
One day, Mercury could slam into Earth, obliterating all life on our planet. That’s a doomsday scenario scientists have said is a small but real possibility.
ScienceNews [sciencemag.org] reports:
It’s hard to predict the fate of our solar system, because no one knows the exact positions of the planets today. Over millions of years, even a 1-centimeter difference in a planet’s position can alter its future position, and the positions of other planets its gravity tugs on, by millions of kilometers. For example, simulations show that in some cases Mercury, which already has a fairly elliptical orbit, can get yanked by Jupiter's gravity so that the little planet crosses Venus’s orbit. Then Mercury can hit Earth—or, through its gravity, jostle the orbits of the other inner planets so that Venus or Mars crashes into us instead.
Physicist Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii lucked into SIX Weeks of uninterrupted time on a brand spanking new Cray Computer. He ran 1600 simulations of the Solar Systems future using the best planetary starting positions available.
In none of his scenarios was Earth struck by another planet. Whew!
Some disagree, citing the work of Jacques Laskar, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who ran simulations 6 years ago and found one case in which a planet hit Earth.
Both scientists agree that Mercury may be doomed, DOOMED they say.
Both studies found that in roughly 1% of simulations, Mercury eventually acquired a highly elliptical orbit. In three simulations, Mercury hit the sun. And in seven other cases, it hit Venus.
