Quote:
Originally Posted by Stonius
But presuming it's fair to say that the earth was once in a different orbit. Is there any way of surmising what that ancient orbit would be?
|
There's a very good two part BBC serie presented by Brian Cox called the planets. My understanding is that Jupiter runs the show in term of everything else that orbits the sun as it coalesced at about the same time in the original gas cloud. Everything else that influences orbital mechanics is pretty insignificant in orders of magnitude. The gas giants orbits tightened closer to the sun before moving back to where they are now so the inner objects were many and colliding a lot more.