Answer 1:
Part of your question is "How fast does gravity
travel?" This is a matter of debate, particularly
because we haven't observed a rapid change in mass
like the scenario you described.
Classically, gravity can be thought of as a
distortion in space and time. Think of a bowling
ball on a mattress - a marble placed nearby will
roll toward the bowling ball because of the
surface of the mattress curves. From that
perspective, the gravitational effects of removing
the Sun would strongly depend on how that
distortion was removed. (If the distortion wasn't
removed, for example the sun were replaced with an
equally massive black hole, there wouldn't be an
effects on the planets' orbits.) I think that
moving tangentially away along straight paths is
the most likely scenario. If the Sun's mass
were slowly reduced, the planets might spiral
outward as their orbital radius increased with
time.
Settling around Jupiter seems less likely -
while massive for a planet, Jupiter has only
1/1047 (0.0955%) the mass of our Sun and is only
317 times the mass of Earth, so the mass ratio
between Jupiter and Earth is smaller than the Sun
and any of its planets, which leads to weaker
forces. Plus, if the other planets move
tangentially away from their current orbits, it is
most likely they would move away from Jupiter too
fast to establish stable orbits. This is an
interesting question and I think you could explore
this with some calculations on scratch paper using
the universal law of gravitation:
F = G*m1*m2/d2
How does the force compare if m2
is Jupiter instead of the sun? At what distance
would an Earth rotating around Jupiter have the
same force as one rotating around the Sun (at our
current distance)?
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