I got into the silliest debate last night with a friend. We were talking about a comic book series where the world was destroyed, and he suggested that such an event would be cataclysmic for the rest of the solar system. I thought it would probably have very little effect, other than possibly causing a new asteroid belt and a few debris impacts on other planets. He said that the change in gravitational pulls on other planets would be the major problem. He also said that if Mercury vanished, our axis would wobble as a result of the change and cause major problems, which I didn’t think seemed likely at all.
You are correct, but since you’re talking about a comic book series, the normal rules of physics don’t apply, so that should give you a lot more dramatic license.
The planets have very little gravitational influence on each other, as you can see from this article. Just wanted to put another data point in your favor.
It would only cause a drastic effect on the Moon; the material expelled by the exploding Earth will cause some massive impacts on the Moon;
before long the slightly larger and hotter Moon would move out of the debris cloud into a new more eccentric orbit around the sun (as the new third planet).
Was the comic series Cosmic Odyssey by Jim Starlin?
We like to think our disappearance would have consequences, but really, it wouldn’t (beyond the hilarity that a wandering Moon would present). The Magnusson-Levy meteor swarm had a pretty serious impact on Jupiter, but not on us. It provided some neat newspaper photos, but that’s about it. We’re the Tree in the Forest.
Not strictly true. The Badastronomy page explains how the gravitational influence isn’t going to cause earthquakes or other disasters that sensation seekers periodically proclaim.
But the gravitational influence does play a part in determining where the planet’s lie in relation to each other and their orbits around the sun.
However, should the Earth blow up, if the resulting fragments stayed in much the same place, the gravitational influence on the other planets would stay much the same. So they wouldn’t be significantly affected.
Having one more Earth-mass of stuff flying in random trajectories throughout the solar system would be a lot more cataclysmic than gravitational effects.
Destroyed, surface ploughed into magma? Destroyed, unmade completely? Destroyed, blown into asteroids?
Also, if the earth were nudged slightly cfurther from the sun due to the removal of mars, or something, it might become uninhabitable, but if mars were, no-one’d notice becase no-one lives there
