# How This Alternate Solar System Influences the Milankovitch Cycle



## Jdailey1991 (Jul 25, 2016)

I have just found out that the Milankovitch Cycle, a machination responsible for the creation of the Pleistocene ice ages, has its part played partly by orbit from the entire solar system. As a result of the orbit we already have back home, the cycles--on average--work as follows:

Eccentricity (orbital shape): Varying between 0.000055 and 0.0679 over the course of 100,000 years.

Obliquity (axial tilt): Varying between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees over the course of 41,000 years.

Axial precession (change in the orientation of the rotational axis on a rotating body): Polaris being the North Star for a total of 26,000 degrees.



In this alternate solar system, the changes are as follows:

 I)  Mercury is twice as wide as Earth and eight times as massive, orbiting the sun from a distance of 5.5 million miles

II)  Venus is 175% the width of Earth and 5.5 times as massive, orbiting the sun from a distance of 65 million miles


III)  Earth stays right where it is, orbiting the sun from a distance of 93 million miles, but the moon is a different story. It is now 3200 miles in diameter, has only 14% of Earth's gravity and orbits Earth from a distance of 330,000 miles.


IV)  Mars, now a waterworld, is 2.6 times as wide as Earth and seven times as massive. It orbits the sun from a distance of 141.6 million miles.


V)  Neptune and Pluto simply don't exist.



With this list, I was told that such changes wouldn't have any dramatic effects on gravitational pertubations.

With that in mind, how would these changes affect the durations and extent of Earth's Milankovitch cycles?


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## CupofJoe (Jul 25, 2016)

I don't wish to be trite but my first stop on answering this question is to take a college or university course in Astrophysics... Wow...
I know that the other planets in the Solar System have very little direct effect on Earth. 
The Sun is just about the whole ball of wax when it comes to forces. 
So my guess they would have little to no noticeable effect.
The bigger effect might be that these larger planets relatively close to Earth would probably change the number and scale of impact events. I don't know if they would sweep them up or pull more in...
A large Mars makes me think Earth impacts would increase as it would perturb the Asteroid Belt and may be even stop it forming.
Is the a story drive reason for these changes or a mind-exercise?


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## Jdailey1991 (Jul 25, 2016)

CupofJoe said:


> Is the a story drive reason for these changes or a mind-exercise?




Both.  I always find it best to build a blueprint before I could do any embellishing.


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