

What Would Happen If the Sun Ceased to Exist for Just One Second? - davidbarker
http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-the-sun-ceased-to-exist-for-just-o-1630272866

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lutusp
Quote: "Some objects would travel closer to others, and others would travel
further away. This would result in many objects finding themselves in unstable
orbits where the slight increase in gravity between them could give them a
slight kick, which over time could lead to objects being ejected from the
solar system entirely, or tugged out of their orbits and into other objects
and planets."

The linked article suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of orbital
dynamics -- that absent an extraordinary event like the sun momentarily
disappearing, the solar system's orbital behavior is reliably mathematically
predictable.

But in fact, the solar system, indeed any orbital system with more than two
bodies, is potentially a chaotic system, meaning one that is extraordinary
sensitive to initial conditions, and one whose long-term behavior cannot be
predicted in advance.

This means that the hypothetical scenario, in which the sun disappears for one
second, only changes the unpredictable long-term result, it doesn't turn a
predictable outcome into an unpredictable one.

More here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-
body_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem)

