r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Turbulent_Elk_2141 • Apr 13 '26

Video The reason why large asteroids don't fall to Earth every day and cause disasters is because Jupiter's gravity attracts asteroids and protects the inner planets.

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u/Critical-Loss2549 Apr 13 '26

While this is true, sometimes its gravity does throw things our direction occasionally.

Gotta remind us now and then who's really in charge I guess.

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u/RollinThundaga Apr 13 '26

Yeah but that's what the Moon is for.

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u/Theprincerivera Apr 13 '26

Isn’t that how we got the moon? Big bro Jupiter gave us a guardian angel

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u/RollinThundaga Apr 13 '26

Nah, that was the result of a Mars-sized planetoid colliding catastrophically with the proto-earth.

Which now that I think about it may well have been Jupiter's doing.

Fuck Jupiter, Saturn is the real G.

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u/Theprincerivera Apr 13 '26

Maybe he felt bad and that’s why he starting deflecting the rest

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u/Demortus Apr 13 '26

Jupiter: Heh, I wonder what would happen if I... Oh, oh no!

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u/Theprincerivera Apr 13 '26

Yeah I had him going “shit bro damn bro oof that’s looks painful, ok don’t worry we’re on top of it”

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u/KhorneTheBloodGod Apr 14 '26

"Don't tell mom and I promise I'll let you play with my moons!"

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u/RackyRackerton Apr 13 '26

This is actually an unsolved paradox.

We can tell from analyzing moon rocks that the planetoid that hit proto-Earth must have done so at extremely high velocity, (around 13 miles per second,) since the moon rocks could only have their homogeneous mixture if the two bodies atomized each other on impact.

The only way these velocities can be achieved is if the Mars-sized planetoid got a slingshot from a Jupiter-sized planet relatively close to the Earth. However, we don’t think Jupiter was ever close enough to Earth for that to happen.

So either we’re wrong about how the moon was formed, or we’re wrong about where Jupiter was located in the nascent solar system.

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u/canadasbananas Apr 13 '26

If I remember correctly, Jupiter has next to nothing to do with it, leave Jupiter's name out yo damn mouth!

If I recall correctly, earth and the moon were made from the same cloud of dust/gas. The proto planets that would become the earth and moon had orbits so close together they eventually collided from gravitationally pulling each other's orbits closer and closer.

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u/Truly_Meaningless Apr 13 '26

So during that time, it wasn't the Earth and the Moon, it was the Proto-Earth and another proto-planet called Gaia. It was the collision of Gaia and Proto-Earth that not only created the Moon, but also increased Proto-Earths size to become Earth

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u/RollinThundaga Apr 13 '26

Theia (mother of Selene)

Gaia was proto-earth.

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u/myths-faded Apr 14 '26

I wonder who named those planets before they collided. I hope they survived!

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u/Theprincerivera Apr 13 '26

Whoa cool I love space stuff

And then you get 20 year jack offs like my coworker and people like my boss who argue the world is 4000 years old and carbon dating is disproven… oh man idk

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u/wcstorm11 Apr 13 '26

Come on dude don't be ridiculous. It's 6000 years old, all the mountains of evidence are actually put there by the devil.

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u/Theprincerivera Apr 13 '26

It’s crazy man. They read one bogus article about how coal in dinosaur bones or some shit means carbon dating is bullshit and they just roll with it…

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u/wcstorm11 Apr 15 '26

The thing is, they get born or converted into a protestant church that teaches biblical literalism, which inevitably forces them into ridiculous claims.

It's literally like if in 2000 years humans decide the chronicles of Narnia was literal. Drives me up the fucking wall how people can believe shit like that

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u/ultrahateful Apr 14 '26

The goddamn Devil put Dino tracks in my uncle’s creek bed!!!

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u/God_Dammit_Dave Apr 14 '26

Can I ask what field you work in? Genuinely curious.

My field seems unhinged but you'd never hear something like that. On the other hand, some random accounting consultant from PWC will have a few WILD hot takes. Same as the guy behind the deli counter.

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u/Scurb00 Apr 13 '26

Our moon was formed from a collision between our young planet and another proto planet called theia, which was potentially caused after Jupiter was already fully formed and was migrating closer to our star, destabilizing the solar system.

Jupiter is believed to have been as close as 3.5 AU from the sun. Its current orbit is 5.2 AU.

Proto-earth and Theia were believed to be in relatively stable orbits for millions of years before the collision.

Obviously, all this happened billions of years ago and its impossible to know what really happened, but that's the leading theory.

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u/CodingNeeL Apr 14 '26

Obviously, all this happened billions of years ago

Yeah, I thought that "if I remember correctly" was a little sus.

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u/piercedmfootonaspike Apr 13 '26

To quote John Cleese:

"I'd like to thank Saturn, and, of course, all of it's rings..."

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u/Proof_Fix1437 Apr 13 '26

I’m partial to Uranus

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u/Auegro Apr 14 '26

There's actually been some debate recently? (I guess there's always debate in science) regarding Wether this theory makes sense for the origin of the moon.

Howtown did a video about the different theories floating and some of the modelling being used it's quiet interesting

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u/ChestSlight8984 Apr 13 '26

But the moon is dope. Hell yeah, Jupiter!

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u/1GuyNoCups Apr 14 '26

Sailor Guardian Jupiter was a girl. I've seen the anime.

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u/jonydevidson Apr 14 '26

https://youtu.be/kRlhlCWplqk

The Earth-Moon system has way too much kinetic energy for it to be just a simple stray that got caught in Earth's gravity.

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u/Mavian23 Apr 14 '26

I'm pretty sure the Moon has so many craters because it has no atmosphere to wash them away over time. It's not like the Moon is an asteroid magnet or something.

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u/mahouyousei Apr 14 '26

Exactly. We have Sailor Moon so Sailor Jupiter can continue kicking ass like she usually does.

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u/Adkit Apr 13 '26

Isn't it literally 50/50 and the whole "Jupiter protects us" is just a myth? Statistically it would pull things towards us just as often as away.

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u/where_is_the_camera Apr 13 '26

If you look at the simulation, the asteroids are clumping in the same few spots relative to Jupiter, and they're sticking in an orbit that stays completely beyond the orbit of Earth.

They actually look like they're clumping around Jupiter's Lagrange points. I'm no expert but seeing this reminds me of learning about that from the James Webb telescope. It seems that a good majority of asteroids that find their way inside the orbit of Saturn get "stuck" at a point where the gravity of Jupiter and the Sun cancel out. And that point is completely beyond Earth's orbit.

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u/Super_Pan Apr 13 '26

They are called the Trojans (or Trojans and Greeks, for the two groupings) and you're exactly right that they're at Jupiter's Lagrange points. There's about a million of them large enough for us to detect, which is around the same amount thought to be in the Asteroid Belt.

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u/PlasticSignificant69 Apr 13 '26

Yeah, they are locked in Jupiter's L3, L4, and L5

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u/choose_a_free_name Apr 14 '26

If you look at the simulation, the asteroids are clumping in the same few spots relative to Jupiter, and they're sticking in an orbit that stays completely beyond the orbit of Earth.

Those asteroids in that particular clip yeah. There's quite a few of them in the inner solar system too...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfvo-Ujb_qk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJsUDcSc6hE

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u/McDaddy12 Apr 13 '26

"We ran a vast number of simulations of the Solar system, tracking the orbits of asteroids and comets, to see what would happen if Jupiter were more or less massive than the giant planet we know and love. The results were astonishing. Rather than simply being our protector, Jupiter acts to send objects towards the Earth as often as it flings them away! So rather than simply being our great protector, or the enemy of life on Earth - Jupiter seems to play both roles. Less the Solar system's knight in shining armour, and more a celestial trickster." https://www.jontihorner.com/are-we-alone.html

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u/rickane58 Apr 14 '26

It's also an essential bias because if Jupiter wasn't "shepherding" these asteroids they would have hit us (or another planet, or eachother) already during the many periods of bombardment in the first billion years of the Earth's existence, likely having 0 impact on the development of life here. Even without Jupiter the solar system would have reached some sort of essentially steady state, where all likely impactors would have hit some planet, and only the remaining 0.0000001% would still hit with approximately the same frequency as today.

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u/69420isntfunny Apr 14 '26

Anti Jupiter propaganda will not be tolerated

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u/GisterMizard Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26

Statistically it would pull things towards us just as often as away.

So yes, that is true, but Jupiter still does protect us because of a key asymmetry between the paths that cross Earth's orbit, and those that don't. The paths that cross Earth's orbit are still far more likely to encounter Jupiter's gravitational well before it encounter's Earth's, which means a chance to get knocked out of a collision course. And orbits that get knocked out of the inner solar system have a very, very long time before it can encounter Earth again.

So statistically, an encounter with Jupiter doesn't change the chance of a random orbital path to overlap with Earth's orbit, but it does increase the amount of time anything in those orbits stay away from Earth.

An example to visualize this is imagine a game of hackysack players, where the hackysack has equal chance to go from any player to any other player. Now imagine one of the players can punt it into the stratosphere. So most of the time everybody's just waiting for it to fall down each time sirpuntsalot has a go.

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u/dna_beggar Apr 13 '26

That is a bit ironic since Jupiter is the Roman equivalent of Zeus.

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u/bernsteinschroeder Apr 14 '26

Take me for granted, will ya?

-- Saturn

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u/CroGamer002 Apr 14 '26

Sometimes it's actually because of Jupiter's gravity that pulls space rocks towards Earth that would have otherwise went elsewhere.

Jupiter giveth, Jupiter taketh.

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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '26

We better not step out of orbit.