How This Alternate Solar System Influences the Milankovitch Cycle
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I have just found out that the Milankovitch Cycle, a machination responsible for the creation of the Pleistocene ice ages, has its part played partly by orbit from the entire solar system. As a result of the orbit we already have back home, the cycles--on average--work as follows:
- Eccentricity (orbital shape): Varying between 0.000055 and 0.0679 over the course of 100,000 years.
- Obliquity (axial tilt): Varying between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees over the course of 41,000 years.
- Axial precession (change in the orientation of the rotational axis on a rotating body): Polaris being the North Star for a total of 26,000 degrees.
In this alternate solar system, the changes are as follows:
- Mercury is twice as wide as Earth and eight times as massive, orbiting the sun from a distance of 5.5 million miles
- Venus is 175% the width of Earth and 5.5 times as massive, orbiting the sun from a distance of 65 million miles
- Earth stays right where it is, orbiting the sun from a distance of 93 million miles, but the moon is a different story. It is now 3200 miles in diameter, has only 14% of Earth's gravity and orbits Earth from a distance of 330,000 miles.
- Mars, now a waterworld, is 2.6 times as wide as Earth and seven times as massive. It orbits the sun from a distance of 141.6 million miles.
- Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus have each doubled in diameter. Their distances from the sun are 500 million, 900 million and two billion miles.
- Neptune and Pluto simply don't exist.
With this list, I was told that such changes wouldn't have any dramatic effects on gravitational pertubations.
With that in mind, how would these changes affect the durations and extent of Earth's Milankovitch cycles?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/46378. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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