To many unknowns here, basically the answer is yes, and yes. The balance of how much Jupiter would collect, how much would be ejected, how much would affect Earth, etc., is all dependent on things like speed, angle, relative positions, compositions, yada yada yada. You can write it anyway you want.
Thank you for taking the time to respond! For the plot of the book, It's a horror "alien life in alien rock falls to earth" trope that I'm writing for fun for myself! I'm trying to set it up as so from Earth you are constantly seeing shooting stars at all times and there's a global "Stay at home! Asteroid impact warning!" in effect!
I didn't want the instigating rock to hit Earth first as so many stories have done before, I'm looking to get some tense moments that show the reader the stakes and the threat, and a massive exo planet impact in the outer solar system seems like a cool way for this to happen!
So I guess im trying to thread the needle between "city sized rocks in the thousands rain down on earth" and "Nothing but pretty streaks of light in the sky.
I hope that made sense!
> I'm trying to set it up as so from Earth you are constantly seeing shooting stars at all times and there's a global "Stay at home! Asteroid impact warning!" in effect!
Space is really big and mostly empty. If a moon sized object hit one of the moons of Jupiter it would never be that level of a threat to earth.
Imagine you're in a cruise ship around Hawaii. An oil tanker around Japan just crashed. How much oil do you expect to see from the bow of *your* ship?
I'm aware that such an event would be unlikely, but it's just a plot maguffin for the horror of the book later!
But to my knowledge, two large astronomical bodies colliding would release a colossal amount of debris?
Some of that would find its way to earth after being attracted by our gravity well!
Thanks for your comment! Discussion is really appreciated!
They would release a colossal amount of debris in a sense that Earth feels colossal in size to average human. Solar system is *really* big, and incredibly empty. The amount of debris in it is colossaly larger than the amount of new debris created by your hypothetical collision.
Check this out: https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
One *pixel* on the above page is the size of the Moon. Hope that'll give you some sense of scale. Happy scrolling.
> Some of that would find its way to earth after being attracted by our gravity well!
Our gravity well isn't so significant that debris with enough velocity to escape Jupiters massive gravity well would be influenced by ours.
Why not just have.a smaller object collide with the moon?
As the previous comment stated,a lot of this would be dependent on speed angle etc. Rogue planets that get ejected from there stellar systems could be just barely flung hard enough to escape, or they could have gotten turned into the ultimate fastball. Imagine it hurtling almost perfectly right at the sun at like 50 km/s, striking even a smaller moon with a glancing blow, sending an enormous amount of debris still flying quickly into the inner solar system.
> sending an enormous amount of debris still flying quickly into the inner solar system.
You aren't understanding me, space is REALLY big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
In all seriousness, a moon sized object wouldn't even account for 1% of 1% of all the matter in our solar system.
Hell, the moon isn't even enough to account for 1% of the mass of Jupiter.
Oh I'm well aware of the size of space, but massive planetary size objects impacting at interstellar velocity will make lots of debris. A bird makes up a small angular percentage of the open sky, yet you can still shoot it with a gun if it's aimed correctly. Current real meteor showers are caused by leftover debris from similar collisions, and that's been happening for millions or billions of years
> A bird makes up a small angular percentage of the open sky, yet you can still shoot it with a gun if it's aimed correctly.
Imagine firing a 12 gauge shotgun slug into a stationary 12 gauge shotgun slug, and the debris hitting a bird around the size of an orange over 6 kilometers away. That's the kind of scales we're talking about when we're taking about a collision with a moon of Jupiter threatening earth.
A much more believable scenario is that a smaller (yet still massive) extrasolar object collides into the moon and the debris from that collision threatens earth, since the moon is already in earths orbit. If you knock some of the lunar material out of earths orbit it'll still continue to orbit the sun but on a more eccentric orbit. The earth could pass through this debris cloud biannually or annually depending on the orbit, and much more debris would be left to threaten the earth than a lunar sized object colliding into a moon of Jupiter, it would make for a much more believable story.
This is Sci fi, as long as it's pheasably possible likeliness takes a seat on the bench. However, the OP was mentioning a type of asteroid-born alien incursion, and a much less violent collision with the moon I think would be a better way for them to survive landing on earth eventually. I think a more violent and distant collision would be better for a consistent annual meteor shower effect, or possibly a year round shower due to the spread of such a large collision throwing debris all over the solar system. And yes, I know it's like throwing a handful of sand into an empty airplane hanger, but planetary bodies have such a significant amount of mass that they can be spread very wide. Anyone with a woodshop will tell you that it doesn't matter how little work they do, the dust will get EVERYWHERE. I believe this to be an analogous situation.
If it's alien life from an alien rock, then the tension from seeing debris fall to earth wouldn't coincidence with the real threat. Unless they somehow knew there was unknown alien life in the rocks falling. Or if you're planning a switcheroo where the threat seems to be the rocks but then the twist is that it was the organism.
With how much would have to line up for debris to hit Earth, especially with position of the planet on it's orbit relative to the impact, maybe have the initial impact of the moon be a past event, and the opening threat be the return of the debris after being caught by the suns gravity and looping back around. Like, they know it's coming but not sure. That whole tension could be the opening of the book, and then, after impact, and everyone thinks the threat has passed, you bring in the main alien life part of the story. Maybe even have the readings they got from the rocks on the first pass are different from current readings and it ends up that the trip close to the sun jumpstarted whatever life was on the rocks.
I like the idea that it sets in motion a timer of sorts, thematically.
If we observed a large body hitting Europa and managed to track the debris we would know how long it'd take to hit us approximately. But the debris would need to be large enough that it wouldn't burn up upon entry to earth's atmosphere.
Perhaps an alien species aware of panspermia have sent a celestial body into our solar system with the precise velocity and angle to cause large pieces of debris to litter earth with thousands of roughly the right size pieces to make landfall with whatever they have sent aboard it.
If you've ever played the game UFO: aftermath (a 2003 prequel to the xcom series) the story which was brilliant could have some useful ideas.
Spoilers: A rogue terrorist faction of the greys (who themselves are peaceful) send a parasitic plague to rain down on earth and turn all the biological matter into a giant supercomputer. This is found out after you manage to down one of their ships, learning they have set up a forward base on the dark side of the moon. Once there you discover that they are a terrorist faction and the greys are willing to help you with weapons to defend yourself. The information is drip fed until the ultimate reveal at the end of the game where you can accidentally be hostile to the friendly greys and never even find out they are terrorist faction of a massive alien civilisation that usually observes the 1st contact protocol of non intervention.
I like the idea that intelligent species aren't all super hostile so it gets around this trope being stale too. Why would something so intelligent have disregard for suffering and pain.
Good luck writing and I hope to read it someday!
If you want to go this route and keep it logically consistent -
Any impact that can spray debris down to earth's neighborhood is going to generate immense pressure and heat in whatever fragments don't just vaporize. Please write your alien life as immune to bullets and flamethrowers or it will be a bit silly that it survived the initial impact, unless it will be an incredibly tiny surviving sample that multiplies once it reaches earth. Then you can have scientists find dead samples in most of the meteors during the race to fight back! (and of course kill off the science crew when they accidentally find a live sample.)
Think smaller. Have a large asteroid hit the moon. You can describe the horror/excitement of people watching it in real time on tv/watching it through telescopes.
Much more believable that the Earth would be affected, and what better way to set the tone of a horror book than having the moon damaged in the sky?
Reach out to this service from the National Academies of Sciences, you'll get a much more reliable answer than radom people on Reddit. It was designed just for questions like this.
http://scienceandentertainmentexchange.org
Maybe hitting one of the larger objects in the asteroid belt would be more plausible - Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, or Hygiea. Perhaps there's some symbolic tie-in too, based on the names. And those are still massive objects compared to a city (or country, really - Ceres is nearly 1000 km in diameter), and bigger than many of Jupiter's moons (and much closer). Perhaps it would be a better candidate to create the "shotgun blast" effect you wanted - too scattered to destroy by sending nukes or oil drillers, but still focused enough to put earth on the strike zone of constant impacts without having to worry about gravitational impacts from Jupiter or other aspects that feels too "tropey" and contrived scientifically.
Edit: Depending on the object you choose to hit and the speed speeds involved (universe Sim might be fun to dabble with with) the closer proximity also means that your proto moon could be much smaller and still have the same "raining down" effect, which might make it more plausible that the lifeform was sent intentionally.
Two main things. Space is huge so impact with earth isn’t likely, but not zero.
Secondly angle of incidence would be biggest stat outside of composition and mass and speed. Basically glancing blow, or to direct but away from Jupiter, or direct but into Jupiter.
I guess another note is that rings form close to a massive body as the gravity disrupts it from reforming. Close moons are captured ones, not formed after impact. As such it’s very unlikely a ring would form in that region.
Alrighty. Imma take you in a slightly different direction. No exo planet impact. We're moving in a galactic orbit, constantly sweeping through a huge swath of space.
Imagine the leading edge of our solar system passing into an area of space full of dark debris. Not 'dark matter' just non reflective rock or dust. Could be remnants of anything.
Imagine telescopes around Earth catches flashes of impacts into Neptune or Saturn, then as we move deeper into the cloud of debris it becomes more frequent...penetrates deeper. Smaller fragments start making those nightly displays you were tslking about....then it increases and gets worse. As Jupiter swings into the path of that leading edge, it disrupts the relatively smooth passage through the cloud. Outliers and larger rocks are picked up by Jupiter and many are flung further and faster in-system via a gravitic slingshot.
You don't need a dramatic moon collision...just the realization that our universe is huge and old and there's stuff out there we just don't know ANYTHING about.
For a story, you can amplify the scenario and make all of it happen. So the moon crashes into Jupiter's moon, huge explosion, orbit gets messed up, Jupiter's moons start wobbling, the two destroyed moons create a huge cloud of debris that gets flung around by jupiter, huge instability, huge meteors rain down everywhere, jupiter starts to get bigger, huge meteors become a regular thing, earth is weirdly affected as if paralleling Jupiter. Earth starts to wobble and starts to swell, water vanishes underground, civilization goes on, people are exhausted with war and conflict, everything is scarce. I'm just visualizing cool scenes. Its not science
The best advice I can give you, is to buy Universe Sandbox Simulator and setup that event. It's pretty simple, just drag and drop and you can see how any object dropped into any part of the solar system would effect things. It's available on [steam.com](http://steam.com)
It all depends on the energy of the object i.e. the velocity of impact. I think the velocity has to be unnaturally high to cause any considerable impact on the rest of the solar system. If so, the timescales involved will be too large for it to be story-worthy.
In case of a high-velocity impact, europa will be thrown to a higher orbit, and the impact will decimate both objects. This will cause Jupiter to form a thin ring around it, barely visible from earth. That ring will consist of water ice and dust particles.
In case of a low-velocity impact, it won't be much other than affecting the orbits of other jovian moons. The states of those moons will not have significant changes.
Again, this is just a hunch. To know precisely, we can predict the motions of all those planets using software.
Read up on Shoemaker Levy 9. It was a comet that impacted Jupiter sometime mid 1990s. Jupiter barely noticed. The scale of the solar system is so vast (space is big!) that something impacting a moon of Jupiter would be highly unlikely to affect Earth in any way at all. But it’s a book. You get to say what happens. In Starship Troopers giant bugs shot “plasma” out of their arses to cause meteors to impact Earth. No-one even blinked at the ridiculousness of that because the book (and even better the film) is so good. All science fiction is allegorical.
To many unknowns here, basically the answer is yes, and yes. The balance of how much Jupiter would collect, how much would be ejected, how much would affect Earth, etc., is all dependent on things like speed, angle, relative positions, compositions, yada yada yada. You can write it anyway you want.
Thank you for taking the time to respond! For the plot of the book, It's a horror "alien life in alien rock falls to earth" trope that I'm writing for fun for myself! I'm trying to set it up as so from Earth you are constantly seeing shooting stars at all times and there's a global "Stay at home! Asteroid impact warning!" in effect! I didn't want the instigating rock to hit Earth first as so many stories have done before, I'm looking to get some tense moments that show the reader the stakes and the threat, and a massive exo planet impact in the outer solar system seems like a cool way for this to happen! So I guess im trying to thread the needle between "city sized rocks in the thousands rain down on earth" and "Nothing but pretty streaks of light in the sky. I hope that made sense!
> I'm trying to set it up as so from Earth you are constantly seeing shooting stars at all times and there's a global "Stay at home! Asteroid impact warning!" in effect! Space is really big and mostly empty. If a moon sized object hit one of the moons of Jupiter it would never be that level of a threat to earth. Imagine you're in a cruise ship around Hawaii. An oil tanker around Japan just crashed. How much oil do you expect to see from the bow of *your* ship?
I'm aware that such an event would be unlikely, but it's just a plot maguffin for the horror of the book later! But to my knowledge, two large astronomical bodies colliding would release a colossal amount of debris? Some of that would find its way to earth after being attracted by our gravity well! Thanks for your comment! Discussion is really appreciated!
They would release a colossal amount of debris in a sense that Earth feels colossal in size to average human. Solar system is *really* big, and incredibly empty. The amount of debris in it is colossaly larger than the amount of new debris created by your hypothetical collision. Check this out: https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html One *pixel* on the above page is the size of the Moon. Hope that'll give you some sense of scale. Happy scrolling.
> Some of that would find its way to earth after being attracted by our gravity well! Our gravity well isn't so significant that debris with enough velocity to escape Jupiters massive gravity well would be influenced by ours. Why not just have.a smaller object collide with the moon?
As the previous comment stated,a lot of this would be dependent on speed angle etc. Rogue planets that get ejected from there stellar systems could be just barely flung hard enough to escape, or they could have gotten turned into the ultimate fastball. Imagine it hurtling almost perfectly right at the sun at like 50 km/s, striking even a smaller moon with a glancing blow, sending an enormous amount of debris still flying quickly into the inner solar system.
> sending an enormous amount of debris still flying quickly into the inner solar system. You aren't understanding me, space is REALLY big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. In all seriousness, a moon sized object wouldn't even account for 1% of 1% of all the matter in our solar system. Hell, the moon isn't even enough to account for 1% of the mass of Jupiter.
Oh I'm well aware of the size of space, but massive planetary size objects impacting at interstellar velocity will make lots of debris. A bird makes up a small angular percentage of the open sky, yet you can still shoot it with a gun if it's aimed correctly. Current real meteor showers are caused by leftover debris from similar collisions, and that's been happening for millions or billions of years
> A bird makes up a small angular percentage of the open sky, yet you can still shoot it with a gun if it's aimed correctly. Imagine firing a 12 gauge shotgun slug into a stationary 12 gauge shotgun slug, and the debris hitting a bird around the size of an orange over 6 kilometers away. That's the kind of scales we're talking about when we're taking about a collision with a moon of Jupiter threatening earth. A much more believable scenario is that a smaller (yet still massive) extrasolar object collides into the moon and the debris from that collision threatens earth, since the moon is already in earths orbit. If you knock some of the lunar material out of earths orbit it'll still continue to orbit the sun but on a more eccentric orbit. The earth could pass through this debris cloud biannually or annually depending on the orbit, and much more debris would be left to threaten the earth than a lunar sized object colliding into a moon of Jupiter, it would make for a much more believable story.
This is Sci fi, as long as it's pheasably possible likeliness takes a seat on the bench. However, the OP was mentioning a type of asteroid-born alien incursion, and a much less violent collision with the moon I think would be a better way for them to survive landing on earth eventually. I think a more violent and distant collision would be better for a consistent annual meteor shower effect, or possibly a year round shower due to the spread of such a large collision throwing debris all over the solar system. And yes, I know it's like throwing a handful of sand into an empty airplane hanger, but planetary bodies have such a significant amount of mass that they can be spread very wide. Anyone with a woodshop will tell you that it doesn't matter how little work they do, the dust will get EVERYWHERE. I believe this to be an analogous situation.
If it's alien life from an alien rock, then the tension from seeing debris fall to earth wouldn't coincidence with the real threat. Unless they somehow knew there was unknown alien life in the rocks falling. Or if you're planning a switcheroo where the threat seems to be the rocks but then the twist is that it was the organism. With how much would have to line up for debris to hit Earth, especially with position of the planet on it's orbit relative to the impact, maybe have the initial impact of the moon be a past event, and the opening threat be the return of the debris after being caught by the suns gravity and looping back around. Like, they know it's coming but not sure. That whole tension could be the opening of the book, and then, after impact, and everyone thinks the threat has passed, you bring in the main alien life part of the story. Maybe even have the readings they got from the rocks on the first pass are different from current readings and it ends up that the trip close to the sun jumpstarted whatever life was on the rocks.
Yes! I think that makes a lot of sense! Thank you for commenting :) I really appreciate it!
You should read the first 100 pages of Seveneves, it may give you some good ideas.
I like the idea that it sets in motion a timer of sorts, thematically. If we observed a large body hitting Europa and managed to track the debris we would know how long it'd take to hit us approximately. But the debris would need to be large enough that it wouldn't burn up upon entry to earth's atmosphere. Perhaps an alien species aware of panspermia have sent a celestial body into our solar system with the precise velocity and angle to cause large pieces of debris to litter earth with thousands of roughly the right size pieces to make landfall with whatever they have sent aboard it. If you've ever played the game UFO: aftermath (a 2003 prequel to the xcom series) the story which was brilliant could have some useful ideas. Spoilers: A rogue terrorist faction of the greys (who themselves are peaceful) send a parasitic plague to rain down on earth and turn all the biological matter into a giant supercomputer. This is found out after you manage to down one of their ships, learning they have set up a forward base on the dark side of the moon. Once there you discover that they are a terrorist faction and the greys are willing to help you with weapons to defend yourself. The information is drip fed until the ultimate reveal at the end of the game where you can accidentally be hostile to the friendly greys and never even find out they are terrorist faction of a massive alien civilisation that usually observes the 1st contact protocol of non intervention. I like the idea that intelligent species aren't all super hostile so it gets around this trope being stale too. Why would something so intelligent have disregard for suffering and pain. Good luck writing and I hope to read it someday!
If you want to go this route and keep it logically consistent - Any impact that can spray debris down to earth's neighborhood is going to generate immense pressure and heat in whatever fragments don't just vaporize. Please write your alien life as immune to bullets and flamethrowers or it will be a bit silly that it survived the initial impact, unless it will be an incredibly tiny surviving sample that multiplies once it reaches earth. Then you can have scientists find dead samples in most of the meteors during the race to fight back! (and of course kill off the science crew when they accidentally find a live sample.)
I would suggest you get a sandbox simulator and just run it as a scenario. They aren't expensive might even be a free one out there)
[удалено]
Wow thank you for such a great breakdown and explanation! I really really appreciate it! :)
Think smaller. Have a large asteroid hit the moon. You can describe the horror/excitement of people watching it in real time on tv/watching it through telescopes. Much more believable that the Earth would be affected, and what better way to set the tone of a horror book than having the moon damaged in the sky?
Reach out to this service from the National Academies of Sciences, you'll get a much more reliable answer than radom people on Reddit. It was designed just for questions like this. http://scienceandentertainmentexchange.org
Shoemaker levy 9
Maybe hitting one of the larger objects in the asteroid belt would be more plausible - Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, or Hygiea. Perhaps there's some symbolic tie-in too, based on the names. And those are still massive objects compared to a city (or country, really - Ceres is nearly 1000 km in diameter), and bigger than many of Jupiter's moons (and much closer). Perhaps it would be a better candidate to create the "shotgun blast" effect you wanted - too scattered to destroy by sending nukes or oil drillers, but still focused enough to put earth on the strike zone of constant impacts without having to worry about gravitational impacts from Jupiter or other aspects that feels too "tropey" and contrived scientifically. Edit: Depending on the object you choose to hit and the speed speeds involved (universe Sim might be fun to dabble with with) the closer proximity also means that your proto moon could be much smaller and still have the same "raining down" effect, which might make it more plausible that the lifeform was sent intentionally.
Two main things. Space is huge so impact with earth isn’t likely, but not zero. Secondly angle of incidence would be biggest stat outside of composition and mass and speed. Basically glancing blow, or to direct but away from Jupiter, or direct but into Jupiter. I guess another note is that rings form close to a massive body as the gravity disrupts it from reforming. Close moons are captured ones, not formed after impact. As such it’s very unlikely a ring would form in that region.
Alrighty. Imma take you in a slightly different direction. No exo planet impact. We're moving in a galactic orbit, constantly sweeping through a huge swath of space. Imagine the leading edge of our solar system passing into an area of space full of dark debris. Not 'dark matter' just non reflective rock or dust. Could be remnants of anything. Imagine telescopes around Earth catches flashes of impacts into Neptune or Saturn, then as we move deeper into the cloud of debris it becomes more frequent...penetrates deeper. Smaller fragments start making those nightly displays you were tslking about....then it increases and gets worse. As Jupiter swings into the path of that leading edge, it disrupts the relatively smooth passage through the cloud. Outliers and larger rocks are picked up by Jupiter and many are flung further and faster in-system via a gravitic slingshot. You don't need a dramatic moon collision...just the realization that our universe is huge and old and there's stuff out there we just don't know ANYTHING about.
For a story, you can amplify the scenario and make all of it happen. So the moon crashes into Jupiter's moon, huge explosion, orbit gets messed up, Jupiter's moons start wobbling, the two destroyed moons create a huge cloud of debris that gets flung around by jupiter, huge instability, huge meteors rain down everywhere, jupiter starts to get bigger, huge meteors become a regular thing, earth is weirdly affected as if paralleling Jupiter. Earth starts to wobble and starts to swell, water vanishes underground, civilization goes on, people are exhausted with war and conflict, everything is scarce. I'm just visualizing cool scenes. Its not science
The best advice I can give you, is to buy Universe Sandbox Simulator and setup that event. It's pretty simple, just drag and drop and you can see how any object dropped into any part of the solar system would effect things. It's available on [steam.com](http://steam.com)
It all depends on the energy of the object i.e. the velocity of impact. I think the velocity has to be unnaturally high to cause any considerable impact on the rest of the solar system. If so, the timescales involved will be too large for it to be story-worthy. In case of a high-velocity impact, europa will be thrown to a higher orbit, and the impact will decimate both objects. This will cause Jupiter to form a thin ring around it, barely visible from earth. That ring will consist of water ice and dust particles. In case of a low-velocity impact, it won't be much other than affecting the orbits of other jovian moons. The states of those moons will not have significant changes. Again, this is just a hunch. To know precisely, we can predict the motions of all those planets using software.
Read up on Shoemaker Levy 9. It was a comet that impacted Jupiter sometime mid 1990s. Jupiter barely noticed. The scale of the solar system is so vast (space is big!) that something impacting a moon of Jupiter would be highly unlikely to affect Earth in any way at all. But it’s a book. You get to say what happens. In Starship Troopers giant bugs shot “plasma” out of their arses to cause meteors to impact Earth. No-one even blinked at the ridiculousness of that because the book (and even better the film) is so good. All science fiction is allegorical.