Quote: "Some objects would travel closer to others, and others would travel further away. This would result in many objects finding themselves in unstable orbit

Quote: "Some objects would travel closer to others, and others would travel further away. This would result in many objects finding themselves in unstable orbits where the slight increase in gravity between them could give them a slight kick, which over time could lead to objects being ejected from the solar system entirely, or tugged out of their orbits and into other objects and planets." The linked article suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of orbital dynamics -- that absent an extraordinary event like the sun momentarily disappearing, the solar system's orbital behavior is reliably mathematically predictable. But in fact, the solar system, indeed any orbital system with more than two bodies, is potentially a chaotic system, meaning one that is extraordinary sensitive to initial conditions, and one whose long-term behavior cannot be predicted in advance. This means that the hypothetical scenario, in which the sun disappears for one second, only changes the unpredictable long-term result, it doesn't turn a predictable outcome into an unpredictable one. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem