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If Earth orbited Jupiter at Moon distance


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What effects on Earth would we see if its orbital velocity was balanced with Jupiter's gravity at Moon distance to maintain a stable orbit? Assume everything is as it is now and we suddenly found Earth in that situation.

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If Earth orbited  around Jupiter at the moon's present distance from Earth, then it would orbit Jupiter once every 1.43 days.  Assuming it starts with its present rotation rate, then Jupiter would cross the sky every 3.33 days.  However,  it would be undergoing nearly 27,000 times the tidal forces it does now, and this would likely drive a great deal of geological heating and tidal braking, and tidal locking would be the eventual outcome.  It wouldn't be a pleasant place to live.

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Posted (edited)
4 hours ago, Janus said:

If Earth orbited  around Jupiter at the moon's present distance from Earth, then it would orbit Jupiter once every 1.43 days.  Assuming it starts with its present rotation rate, then Jupiter would cross the sky every 3.33 days.  However,  it would be undergoing nearly 27,000 times the tidal forces it does now, and this would likely drive a great deal of geological heating and tidal braking, and tidal locking would be the eventual outcome.  It wouldn't be a pleasant place to live.

Thanks Janus. It would be a highly kinetic environment; catastrophic weather patterns? What would we experience gravitationally in the short term and long term from the present status of things?

Edited by StringJunky
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It's outside Jupiter's Roche limit, so we will remain a large moon and not break up into rings.  As Janus points out, the tidal forces would be incredible, and the heat generated from it would more than compensate for lack of sunlight.  The oceans I'm guessing would boil away as long as Earth's spin was there to generate the heat.  The earthquakes and volcanoes would probably be bad enough that you wouldn't much notice what the weather was trying to add to it.  No sun, but still plenty of heat to drive atmospheric convection, so yea, lots of wind but no rain. Nowhere safe to hide.

We'd be pretty close to the orbit of IO.  Enough for them to interfere?  IO is long since tide locked and doesn't get the geothermal tide heating that a spinning Earth would.

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Just for fun, if you wanted the tidal influence to equal that now exerted by the Moon, you'd have to increase the orbit by a factor of 30, putting it somewhere in between the orbits of Himalia and Lysithea, with an orbital period of over 250 days.

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