Thankfully, something as catastrophic as this won’t happen for millions, if not billions, of years.
Researchers at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, created simulations which observed how close a passing star would have to be in order to alter a planet in our solar system’s orbit and cause a chain reaction of changes, along with the chances of that happening.
Brown said in this particular study, only stars were considered as stellar flybys in their simulations — stars that are 100 times larger than our sun, which are rare. They also simulated flybys with smaller red dwarf stars which are about 5% the size of our sun but are 100 times heavier than that of Jupiter.
"We ran almost 3,000 simulations and in one of those cases we did find that the change of Neptune’s orbit did cause Earth to crash into Mars instead, so it is possible that something could happen like that where it affects Earth directly. It’s much more rare than Mercury crashing into Venus. If this effect were to be happening, it would be very difficult to tell at first and very difficult to do anything about," Brown added.
"So even if we saw that this was the outcome of some event, and we could detail out what was going to happen, the process itself would still take millions of years before the crash even happened. And then once the crash happened, then it would just be more difficult. So, if we were or if some future species were an advanced space-faring species and have lots of capabilities for interplanetary travel, they could attempt to alter the orbit of Mercury to prevent it from happening.
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