Breaking the Solar System

Would the Solar System look the same if everything was 10 times more massive? What if they were closer together? In this Teen Astronomy Cafe —To Go! Instant Pack, students use simulations to model gravitational interactions between planetary objects and apply data from hot Jupiters to simulate exoplanet systems. Students then predict the stability of the Solar System over time and evaluate how sensitive the stability of the Solar System is to changes in the mass of the Sun, orbital properties of the planets, or length of time. This activity is conducted in a Python Notebook, a web-based interactive computational environment that contains code, text, and plots.

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