What if Mars collided with Jupiter?

[Paz]

My son happened to ask me this question (a perfectly reasonable question to ask!) and I've been wondering what the answer is.

If Mars and Jupiter had a head on collision would there be an epic explosion, or just a big "plop", would Mars sink to the core of Jupiter or be melted / vapourised, would it create a ring system or more moons, would Mars be assimilated into the atmosphere/murk, would gravitational tides break Mars up before impact, etc?

How much would be see-able in a scope?!

[jabeoo1]

Shoemaker Levy 9 collided with Jupiter and caused a flash & sustained visible mark on its surface.   I am no physicist but by scaling upwards you have a spectacular show in the eyepiece.  

[Dave In Vermont]

Or it could toss Jupiter out of it's current orbit - with possibly cataclysmic results.

Heads' up!

Dave

[goodricke1]

You wouldn't need a telescope - the resulting conflagration would be easily visible in daylight for weeks or months. It would take a lot of mathematics to predict the exact results but I'd guess Mars would be completely vaporised before reaching the Jovian core, and you'd be left with a molten lump of rock devoid of any gaseous envelope.

[Knight of Clear Skies]

From the right distance, you could toast marshmallows by pointing them at the Jupiter-Mars collision.

Escape velocity for Jupiter is 60 km/s, so that would be the minimum speed for any impact. Plugging in the mass of Mars the energy released would be 1.15 x 10^33 joules (if I've done everything correctly). That's a long way short of Jupiter's gravitational binding energy, so while some gas might be ejected the gas giant would certainly still be there afterwards. Jupiter would puff up in size due to the increase in temperature.

[symesie04]

Sadly im not clever enough to do the math but based on the Levy incident I would of thought Mars would surely be broken up before impact with larger bits producing a series of impacts just as the Levy comet did, their exact brightness and energy would depend on the size of the chunks the gravitational forces of Jupiter broke Mars into. I would also assume some of the debris would escape impact and form a ring system around the giant. Undoubtedly it would all be visible in even the most modest of bins and scopes but daylight eyeball im not so sure about. But if it happens i would be very worried as something has gone very astray in our solar system for one those bodies to be so far from its path.

[saac]

There is no way you would see any Mars/Jupiter impact from the UK with a telescope - it would be cloudy  

Jim

[Paz]

Thanks for the replies - I like the toasting-marshmallows-theory, the end-of-the-solar-system-cataclysm type theories are more worrying - but then as mentioned by symesie04 I guess something pretty cataclysmic would presumably already have had to happen to put them on a collision course!  

[SilverAstro]

Presuming that Mars is a rocky ball all the way through ( if it had a molten core and was made out of the same stuff Earth was then it would have a dynamo and a magnetic field = protection from the solar wind and thus held on to its atmosphere) then it would take a long time in orbit* within the Roche Limit to disrupt/ break apart.

But the original question was "If Mars and Jupiter had a head on collision", which would be too quick within Roche to break it apart into a wide volume, just a few cracks here and there. ( S-L was a pile of ice and maybe a few rocks, not tightly bound, so easy to pull apart) Thus a tremendous impact all in one spot  

Mars is approx 1/3000 the mass of Jupiter so the resultant barycenter would not be greatly changed from Jupiter's present center perhaps.

* if it came in not quite head on, from aprox infinity, it would make a glancing pass on a parabolic path and whizz back out as a two body problem. If it started from rest from within the solar system it would fall into an elliptical orbit round Jupiter with perhaps its periJove within the Roche Limit, depending on the angle of approach, then after a long time it would break up and in the resulting jumble it is a multi-body problem and anyone's guess where and when all the bits would land

 

[SilverAstro]

There is perhaps a further possibility :-

We dont yet know for sure (??) that Jupiter has a solid core to hit head on ! most is just a ball of gas, so Mars (most, or a lot, of it ) might just pass straight through in a rather spectacular fashion

 

[SilverAstro]

A  few hours later ! :-   Although it is called a gas giant it seems that the interior may be liquid metallic hydrogen to about 78% (surprising precision there ? )  of its radius. I knew of a proposed core of metallic hydrogen but thought it to be much smaller than that. It is also possible that it has a rocky core but gravity measurments are not accurate enought. I wonder if Juno will change all of this ?

So how liquid is  'liquid metallic hydrogen', viscous enough to stop a hurtling Mars ?!

Another thought : there was a time when it was thought that Jupiter was almost masive enough to initiate fusion in its core and that it was close to being a second sun, I think now though it is considered to be only one tenth the mass needed ( and I may even be out of date on that as well). Either way, might such a collision release enough energy to precipitate a (may be short lived) fusion should think we would see that , clouds or no !

Dont kids ask the most interesting questions   and this isnt getting my evening meal prepared !! >>

[impactcrater]

it would ruin our plans for a new planet-colony!

[Alien 13]

It would make a big mess...even a tiny asteroid left far more damage than expected.

Alan

[newbie alert]

For both of them to have a 'planet 'status a criteria of this is to have cleared it's orbital path around the sun..The distance between mars and Jupiter varies between 588 and 365 million km as all planets obit the sun on a elliptical path..something would have to be very wrong for either planet to move out of orbit and I'm sure all planets would be effected in the same way..

As a add on..there is a theory that Jupiter was once in a different position in the solar system..alot closer to the sun,but that's millions of years ago..our time on earth as a comparison is a mere blip..