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Q&A

Scale down the Solar system according to Earth

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Let's say I have an OCD and I want everything to be perfect. I want all the planets and The sun of our solar system to be equal in size. Apart from that, I want the distance between the orbits to be exactly same for each planet, their speed around the sun and their own orbital speed to be same too.
What would happen? Would there be devastating consequences or not much? As far as I have guessed, EARTH will become colder because sunlight will be less hot and reach us slowly.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10207. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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The first thing that would happen is that it would wreak havoc with every orbit in the solar system.

The orbits of the planets around the sun have their focal point very close to the sun's centre because the sun is so very much more massive than anything else in the solar system.

In a binary system (two objects of somewhat similar mass), the orbit of the two objects will be relatively stable with a focal point between the two objects; technically, the focal point will be at the common center of mass, which iff the two objects have identical mass should be at the center of an imaginary line drawn between the two objects' centers. Besides binary stars, in our immediate neighborhood Pluto and Charon form a binary system.

(In fact, perturbations in the star due to planets tugging on it is one of the techniques used to detect exoplanets.)

A trinary system (three objects) is more involved, and less likely to be stable, but follows the same principle: all objects orbit the common center of mass. I think we have some questions here on the site about planets in binary star systems.

By the time you move into systems with more than three objects (especially if those objects are of similar mass), you are heading straight into the unknown. While examples of systems of more than three stars exist (even triple star systems with planets, like Gliese 667), these consist of bodies of dissimilar mass. I have serious doubts that a system consisting of more than three bodies of similar mass even can be stable in a natural environment.

If all bodies in the solar system were somehow magically changed to have the same mass, that would upset the center of mass in the solar system. Everything would then start orbiting around the new center of mass, with likely increasing perturbations due to the changes in the location of the center of mass as the objects orbit the location of the center of mass.

The solar system would look massively different, and both the sun as well as planets would likely be ejected in various directions on either hugely different orbits, or on escape trajectories. Either way would be a Bad Thing.

So the amount of sunlight reaching Earth in this scenario is likely to be (at least among) the least of your problems.

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