Planetary Relocation

Tangel: This is where you're going to say something really terrible. But this was Bob's idea, and he thinks it's possible, so you can get mad at him. We're going to move Star City out of the galaxy, with a jump gate.
Earnest Redding: That woman! I swear, someday she's going to ask me to move the galaxy.

— Aeon 14: Starfire

Someone decides to poke physics in the eye and move an entire planet (or significantly-sized moon) out of its orbit. Destruction ensues, big-time, as once poked, physics starts in with the gravity shifts on several levels, unless for whatever reason it doesn't. However this doesn't always have to be hostile; maybe it's to move the planet into a more preferable orbit or escape some sort of cataclysm. Or the planet could be lifeless, so it's done for some sort of scientific purpose.

One form that this sometimes takes in fiction is the Klemperer rosette, which can be a group of planets that have been moved from their normal orbits and set to orbit around their center of mass.

Can be an extreme form of Monumental Theft. Expect an Alien Sky because of the transportation. Might risk a Colony Drop and/or Earth-Shattering Kaboom if the planet is transported too close to something else or the movement otherwise Goes Horribly Wrong. If the object never arrives in a new orbit and ends up drifting aimlessly in space, it becomes a Rogue Planet. May overlap with Mass Teleportation. If the planet is self-propelled, you're looking at a Planet Spaceship.

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Examples

Audio Plays

• Alien Abduction Role Play: When discussing with the protagonist about the possibility of humanity joining the multi-species society, Acktreal states that it would even be possible to move Earth so that it would be closer to their systems. However, she adds that doing so would be both very expensive and take several thousand years so its only ever been done twice in their history.

Comic Books

• One arc of Barbarella saw Barb hitching a ride aboard a freighter that's delivering custom-made planets to a new star system.
• Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire: After Godot informs The Teleporter of the lengths X-Tel will go to secure it's abilities, up to and including blackmailing Godot with a planet named "Godot's Choice" orbiting a star about to go nova, the Teleporter teleports their headquarters station to a high-Law planet where they'll be apprehended. And for an encore teleports the whole of Godot's Choice to another star system.
• DC Comics
  • Superboy: In volume 1, issue 140 from 1968, Superboy tows several planets to new stars elsewhere in the universe using a giant chain, to rescue them from a dying galaxy.
  • Blackest Night: After The Reveal that the White/Life Entity is on Earth, the whole Black Lantern Corps go to Earth, including a reanimated planet Xanshi, which serves as a Planet Spaceship for the rest of Black Lanterns.
  • Crisis on Infinite Earths: Around the end of the story, the Anti-Monitor drags the Earth into the Antimatter Universe in order to finish it off. Thanks to Alexander Luthor Jr acting as a portal the heroes are able to pull Earth back to its normal orbit and universe.
  • Infinite Crisis: The ones behind all the events of this Crisis Crossover are Alexander Luthor Jr and Superboy Prime, with the latter moving planets out of their orbits to be aligned as the former requires to make new universes with the Anti-Monitor's technology. This included the "Rann-Thanagar War", where both planets literally collide with each other, provoking a massive planetary disaster.
  • Justice League: A group of white Martians escape their confinement, and proceed to conquer Earth with fearsome ease. The Justice League is put on the defensive, and they huddle on the moon to devise a strategy without the Martians learning about it. The Justice League then taunt the Martians to come fight them, and when they arrive, the moon gets pulled into the Earth's atmosphere. This means that fire will burn on the normally airless moon, which compels the Martians to surrender. The League pull the moon back into its correct orbit afterwards.
  • Justice League of America has an arc where Earth is transported to be part of a massive DNA-like mechanical structure, along with various other planets across the universe. Those behind it, the Quantum Mechanics, are doing so because they are trying to create an afterlife for themselves and are analyzing the various cultures of the planets to get a model for it.
• He-Man/ThunderCats: In order to acquire the Sword of Power from He-Man for his masters, Mumm-Ra uses his magic to move Third Earth out of its orbit and into Eternia's. No mean feat considering the latter planet is in an entirely other dimension. Even Skeletor, who's narrating the events, finds this impressive.
• Marvel Comics
  • Avengers: No Surrender: The Grandmaster transports Earth out of its usual position in the universe in order to pit the Avengers against the warriors selected by his rival, the Challenger.
  • Rom Spaceknight has this as the Dire Wraiths' ultimate invasion plan; which ironically gives Rom and X-Men's Forge the opportunity to banish the vast majority of Wraiths in the universe to Limbo, so great plan that.
  • One of the first things the Beyonders were seen doing was casually grabbing the High Evolutionary's Counter-Earth and moving it to another solar system the same way a regular person would move a chair. Seeing this caused the HE to go utterly screaming mad.
• The entire plot of the Ratchet & Clank comic miniseries revolves around this, as main antagonist Artemis Zogg begins stealing planets from the Solana, Bogon, and Polaris galaxies to create his own Artemis Galaxy. Later in the series it's revealed that this was initially a safety plan to move planets out of danger known as the "Helios Project." However once Qwark beat him in the galactic presidential election and had the project shut down, Zogg stole it and began his plan as an act of revenge towards the captain.
• Transformers: Shattered Glass: In the "Invasion" comic, Ultra Magnus attempts to teleport the Classicverse Earth into the Shattered Glass universe through the use of Terminus Blade. Said teleportation ends up causing cataclysms across the entire globe, and the united forces of the heroic Autobots and Decepticons, as well as evil Decepticons, fight to prevent Ultra Magnus from ripping the planet apart. Thankfully, heroic Soundwave manages to shield the entire planet with a force-field, allowing it to be sent into the Shattered Glass universe unharmed, but Ultra Magnus reveals his plan wasn't to tear the planet apart, but to destroy the entire Classics universe, and he gloats about his victory and leaves as the entire Classics universe gets destroyed in a chain reaction.
• An early issue of Mr. Majestic saw Majestros discover that Earth was being targeted by an Eldritch Abomination that not even he would have been able to repel. Thankfully, the invasion was quite a ways off and the invader was depending upon reports from an advance scout to help it find the Solar System, so Mr. Majestic temporarily rearranged all the planets to mislead the invader away.

Fan Works

• Cycles Upon Cycles: After the Krogan have been infested and made a part of the Zerg Swarm, Kerrigan decides to remove them from Council space, not just her new brood, but the Tuchanka as well. This requires hundreds of Leviathans, many of which are killed in the effort, and the krogan Zerg to enter hibernation to survive the transit. It ultimately works, and Tuchanka is placed in the same system as Char.

Film — Animated

• Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus has Zim, learning Earth isn't anywhere near the Tallest' path of conquest, eventually teleports the planet into their path to prove himself to them.
• Defied in Justice League: Doom. A massive solar flare is heading toward Earth, and they need a way to protect Earth from massive devastation. Superman offers to simply move Earth out of the way, and Batman dismisses it.
  Batman: If we had a week, I couldn't list all the reasons that won't work.
• Recess: School's Out: The main villain's plan involves altering the Moon's orbit in an attempt to change ocean currents, thereby changing North America's climate to be colder, thereby eliminating recess from the US school system permanently.

Film — Live-Action

• Bruce Almighty: Bruce decides to use his newly-acquired omnipotence to bring the Moon closer to Earth, so as to make his evening more romantic. The next day, his girlfriend sees the news about the massive tidal wave that resulted.
• In Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Superman uses his superstrength to move the Moon in an attempt to defeat Nuclear Man.
• The Wandering Earth is about Earth being relocated with 12,000 "Earth engines" (read: massive rocket boosters) to another star system after the Sun starts expanding into a red giant.
• In the 1952 Film Serial Zombies Of The Stratosphere, the Martians plan to detonate hydrogen bombs on Earth and Mars to make them swap positions so Mars will be closer to the sun. Why they don't just put Mars in Earth's orbit on the other side of the sun is not mentioned, but then there would be no reason for our Jet Pack-equipped hero to oppose them.

Literature

• Aeon 14:
  • Terraforming in the setting frequently includes relocating planets or smaller planetoids to different orbits with various technologies. Sometimes this involves building huge thrusters, but ships that can move objects also exist. Artificial Gravity is also sometimes used, especially after the technology is miniaturized prior to the FTL Wars.
    • In The Woman Who Lost Everything, the Midditerrans discover that the engines of two tugboats used to relocate dwarf planets are powerful enough to make very effective weapons.
    • In Rika Infiltrator, Rika and her companions arrive in a system with an artificially created Klemperer rosette of five planetoids, each of which contains one of the server nodes of a multinodal AI.
  • In Orion Rising, the protagonists plan "Operation Starflight", researching ways to move the entire New Canaan system out of the Milky Way someday. One theory that's brought up is to generate a solar jet to get the star to provide thrust.
  • In Starfire, Tangel hatches the plan of using a giant jumpgate to teleport Star City, a Dyson Sphere built around a neutron star (and potentially a very powerful strategic weapon), out of its current location deep in the Orion Freedom Alliance and into friendlier space. Cue a "Stargate" pun by some of the other characters, and Gadgeteer Genius Earnest Redding complaining that "someday she's going to ask me to move the galaxy."
• Dragonlance: This turns out to be the reason the gods seemingly abandoned Krynn at the end of Dragons of a Summer Flame, as well as why the constellations in the sky are now different. At the conclusion of the War of Chaos, Takhisis stole the whole planet out from under the other gods' noses, planning to rule it herself. Unfortunately the act proved so taxing for her that she was too weak to prevent other parties from taking an interest in ruling Krynn, and she had to enact a rather risky plan to clear the field again.
• In The Ellimist Chronicles, after the Ellimist ascended one of the first things he used his phenomenal cosmic power for was to nudge prehistoric Earth out of the way of Crayak's weaponry.
• In Evershore, the humans accidentally teleport their fortress world of Detritus into close orbit over the titular kitsen homeworld (they were trying to teleport in some of Detritus' planetary defense platforms, and didn't realize that the system was set up to teleport the entire planet). This causes massive tidal flooding, and it would have done even more damage if the humans hadn't quickly teleported Detritus out to a safer distance.
• In Evgeny Filenko's Galactic Consul series, specifically, the "Phoenix's Next" arc, it is eventually revealed that the planet Finrvolinauerkaf originally belonged to a star system on the opposite side of the galaxy, but was teleported to its current location when a religious cult of the native species discovered a Sufficiently Advanced Alien slumbering in its depths and prayed to it to save them from perceived persecution by the mainstream society — and the being, for whatever reason, complied.
• Mistborn: When using the power at the Well of Ascension, the Lord Ruler attempted to destroy the Deepness by moving Scadrial closer to its sun and burning away the mists. This unfortunately caused the planet to overheat, so - since he had no reference for where the planet should be - he moved it into a wider orbit which made it too cold, and then back into the too-close orbit where he settled with creating the ashmounts and other adaptations to the heat to maintain life on the planet. At the end of the trilogy, Sazed takes up the Shards of Ruin and Preservation, using the knowledge from his metalminds he is able to revert the changes Rashek made and return to planet to its correct orbit.
• Ringworld. The Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds is a Klemperer rosette of five planets set to orbit in a pentagonal pattern around a common point by the Puppeteers.
• The Q Continuum: Part of the story has Q taking Picard back in time to the ancient T'Kon Empire, who were preparing to teleport an entire star. Two of them, in fact. Their plan was to replace their dying star with a younger one, but one of Q's companions at the time caused the star to go nova prematurely. Before returning to the present, Q points out the star they intended to replace their own with, along with the teleportation apparatus, still there, unused and forgotten. He suggests Picard might want to have Starfleet send someone to find it before one of their adversaries stumble onto it.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Corellian Trilogy: The Corellian system has an unusual structure containing five inhabitable worlds, two of which orbit their mutual barycenter, where the ancient Centerpoint Station is located. The system was created artificially: Centerpoint Station is revealed to be a Pointless Doomsday Device capable of moving entire planets through hyperspace, in addition to being able to destroy stars from afar. Some further Arc Welding happened late in Legends' production: Fate of the Jedi reveals the Killiks built Centerpoint Station and constructed the Corellian system under the direction of the Mortis Gods.
  • New Jedi Order: After conquering Coruscant, the Yuuzhan Vong go to work terraforming it into a replica of their original homeworld Yuuzhan'tar. This includes using their gravity-generating dovin basal creatures to move the planet closer to its sun to alter the macroclimate. They also shatter one of the planet's moons to create a ring system, and throw the other two moons out of orbit entirely.
• In The Voyage of Alice, there is Project Venus, a venture to move Venus farther from the Sun and make it habitable. In the ending, one of the characters mentions that the project is almost completed, but it's never brought up again in the other books of the franchise, so it remains unknown whether it really was a success and what the exact results were.
• Fritz Leiber used this trope in multiple short stories:
  • The Wanderer has a planet suddenly appear near Earth out of hyperspace and wreak havoc with physics (and destroy the moon). The premise and title are playing off how the word "planet" comes from the ancient Greek for "wanderer".
  • "A Pail of Air" has the Earth thrown out of orbit into interstellar space. The atmosphere has frozen out, so a roomful of air can be carried in a large bucket.
• In When Worlds Collide, two rogue planets appear out of deep space, the larger one on a collision course with Earth. A small number of people from Earth manage to build rockets and travel to the smaller planet, which is habitable and goes into a stable orbit around the sun after the Earth is destroyed, In the sequel, After Worlds Collide, the survivors learn (by studying records left behind by the original inhabitants) that a star approached too closely to their own solar system, affecting the orbits and throwing the planets away from their sun.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In "The Stolen Earth", the Daleks move the Earth and 26 other planets through time and space to serve as transmitters for their Reality Bomb, making a shell to prevent the planets from freezing over for test subjects.
  • This was also the origin for the Cybermen. Their planet Mondas was knocked off its axis and drifted away into space, necessitating that everyone transform their bodies into machines.
• In Red Dwarf and its novelisations, the crew are faced with the problem of how to escape from an all-destroying black hole. Holly the computer eventually comes up with a solution: to play snooker with planets so that one becomes a cue ball to be used to pot a gas giant into the black hole, thus plugging it for long enough for the Dwarf to accelerate out of the way. Lister, a veteran of the pol table at the Aigburth Arms, promptly necks eight cans of lager, arguing the only way to play pool is when you are utterly pissed. He then attempts a trick shot with spin off the cushion, affecting the orbits of up to eight planetary bodies.
• In the Grand Finale of Smallville, Darkseid teleports his home planet of Apokolips into the Solar system and then moves it slowly towards Earth. Superman throws Apokolips back out of orbit at the climax.
• Space: 1999: The entire plot of the show is kickstarted by a chain reaction of powerful nuclear explosions dislodging the Moon out of Earth orbit, stranding the inhabitants of Moon Base Alpha as the Moon drifts into interstellar space. While its effects on Earth are never shown, it's said that the Moon's release on the ocean tides caused disasters around the world. In a later episode, Commander Koenig deliberately sets off another batch of nuclear explosions to keep the Moon from colliding with another planet.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Deja Q" has the crew dealing with a moon that has somehow been knocked out of orbit and is about to fall on a populated planet, as well as Q, who has been seemingly stripped of his powers and dumped on the Enterprise. The crew attempt to readjust the moon's orbit by generating a warp field to adjust its mass so the Tractor Beam can handle it (inspired by Q's suggestion to alter the gravitational constant of the universe), but it fails. By the end, Q has been restored to his place in the Continuum, and after he leaves, the crew realize that he's also fixed the moon's orbit for them.
• Stargate SG-1: In "Enigma", Narim tells Carter that the Tollan star system originally had two inhabited planets, Tollan and Surita. The Tollans gifted their less technologically advanced neighbor a device to generate unlimited clean energy, which they used to make war on each other. This caused an Earth-Shattering Kaboom that "shifted our planet's orbit 0.3 tekanna", causing cataclysmic events on Tollan as well, and inspiring the Tollans to adopt an Alien Non-Interference Clause.
• The goal of Alien Babalue in Ultraman Leo. He steals the Ultra Key that keeps the Land of Ultra in orbit and sends it careening into Earth, while the Ultra Brtohers will suspect Leo’s brother Astra of the deed and travel to Earth to try and execute him, banking on Leo stepping in and helping his brother.

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin and Hobbes: In the strips for the week of 24 September 1990, Calvin has an Imagine Spot of Spaceman Spiff towing the sixth planet of the Mysterio System out of its orbit and smashing it into planet 5; planet 5 is shattered. The big joke being, this is prompted by the question "6 + 5 = ?" on a math quiz, and Calvin spends so much time in the Imagine Spot that Mrs. Wormwood calls the end of the quiz just as he writes down "6" for the answer.

Radio

• In The BBC's 1980s series Earthsearch the descendants of a starship's original crew, sent to find a habitable planet after the sun threatened to turn nova, arrive back at Earth's solar system 150 years after the ship set out, only to find it gone. Thanks to Time Dilation a million years have passed, and it turns out as their expedition never returned with another planet, humanity developed the technology to move the Earth (surrounded by orbiting artificial suns) to another solar system. The rest of the plot involves trying to find out where Earth ended up.

Tabletop Games

• Starfinder: Pathfinder's main planet Golarion disappeared sometime during the millennia-long period known as the Gap, along with all records and memories of that time. The Gods say that Golarion and its inhabitants still exist somewhere unreachable by magic, but can't or won't elaborate.
• Traveller: In the Vargr Extents, outside the Imperium, there is a Klemperer rosette of planets that orbit around a common point. They were moved into position by the Ancients 300,000 years ago.
• In Warhammer 40,000 moving an entire planet without destroying it is an extremely rare event and a clear sign of an exceedingly advanced technology or powerful sorcery that usually no one in universe believed possible, but moving moons and giant asteroids to make extracting their resources easier or for use as space fortresses and factories is far more common.

Toys

• Transformers: Generation 1 and Transformers: Dark of the Moon both have the Decepticons do this, with Megatron blocking Optimus by way of the fate of Cybertron if he tries to send it back. G1 Optimus saves both; Movie Optimus makes a harsh choice.

Video Games

• Researching the Gravitic Tugs technology in Slipways lets the player tug unsettled planets away from their starting coordinates to make way for new trade routes.
• Exaggerated in Star Trek Online. Iconian Dyson spheres are capable of teleporting themselves and everything within them including their parent star, making them effectively troop transports the size of a star system.
• Stellaris: the unusual civilization Habinte Unified Worlds demonstrates the ability to instantly teleport planets across vast distances. How they're able to do this is a mystery, especially since they have no apparent space travel technology.

Webcomics

• Homestuck uses this in a spoileriffic fashion. In "[S] Cascade", Jade ascends to god tier, and uses her power as Witch of Space to shrink the four planets (and the planet-sized Battlefield) from her Medium, and she transports them to a new universe. Later, Caliborn's home planet is pulled into a black hole and deposited in his version of the Medium. Even later, Caliborn finds out his home planet had been transported once before, as it originated in another universe entirely.
• Schlock Mercenary
  • One story arc of involves a race of aliens who wiped themselves out by ramming a gas giant into another gas giant. The Rant gives a treatise on the type of engine they used- double-ended fusion torch called a "fusion candle"-and tips for turning a planet into an STL Generation Ship.
  • By the end of the series, the Andromeda Dark Matter Aliens use gravity manipulation to disrupt the Unioc home planet out of the Goldilocks zone. This would have doomed all inhabitants, had it not been for Petey arranging for an emergency Brain Upload of all of them.
• xkcd: Parodied in "Moon Landing Mission Profiles", which depicts four possible routes for the Apollo missions due to the requirement to dock the command module to the landing module, and their reasons for rejection. These include "Lunar Orbit Rendezvous",^note The version the finalized missions used, where the landing module and command module are assembled together in orbit of the Moon. the two historical rejected proposals of "Earth Orbit Rendezvous"^note Assemble a large lander in orbit of Earth, rejected for requiring multiple launches per mission. and "Direct Ascent",^note Fly the lander straight to the Moon, rejected because it would require a rocket significantly larger than the Statue of Liberty. and "Lunar Earth Rendezvous", where the Moon itself goes to rendezvous with the mission in low Earth orbit.
  "Rejected because I guess no one thought of it?!"^{Alt Text}If you pick a low enough orbit, it gives you a lot of freedom to use a lightweight launch vehicle such as a stepladder.

Web Original

• DEATH BATTLE!: The Moon gets knocked out of orbit in the Vegeta vs. Shadow episode. Shadow uses Chaos Control to teleport the Moon back into orbit.
• Kurzgesagt: In the "What Happens if the Moon Crashes into Earth" video, the Moon is sent spiralling inward towards the Earth using magic (because realistically, there isn't anything that humans can do within the laws of physics to move the Moon). Over the course of a year, as the Moon gets closer, it creates more destructive ocean tides flooding the entire world, and eventually the Earth itself starts experiencing global earthquakes and volcanism from greater tidal forces. In a Bittersweet Ending though, the Moon doesn't crash into the Earth. This is because once it reaches the Roche Limit (a point where the parent body's gravity overpowers the gravity of its satellite), the Moon is ripped apart and forms a ring system around the Earth, ending its apocalyptic stranglehold on the planet.
• What If?: In "Stop Jupiter", Randall largely dismisses the possibility of significantly altering Jupiter's (or any other planet's) orbit by using it for Spaceship Slingshot Stunts, noting that Jupiter was only affected by 10^-21 meters per second when New Horizons did it on its way to Pluto: Jupiter is so huge it would hardly notice if we threw Earth's entire crust at it. He compares it to trying to stop a moving tractor trailer with a thrown tennis ball: "...you need an awfully big tennis ball."

Western Animation

• Biker Mice from Mars: In the Once Upon A Time on Mars 3-parter, the Biker Mice have to thwart Lawrence Limburger's plan to move Earth into Plutark's orbit with the Plutarkian Tug Transformer. While on this mission, they recall how they once had to save Mars from a similar fate.
• General Lunaris' Evil Plan in the season 2 finale of DuckTales (2017) involves using a massive rocket engine to force the Earth to revolve around the Moon. This ends up having catastrophic effects on the weather until Storkules pushes the Earth back into orbit.
• Futurama
  • "Crimes of The Hot" has global warming caused by robot emissions cause Nixon to resort to gathering all robots to the Galapagos Island in order to kill them with an EM blast. In order to both save them and solve the problem of global warming, Farnsworth has all the robots vent their exhaust upwards to physically move the Earth out of the way and into a larger orbit, thus cooling it (and also extending the year by a week).
  • "A Farewell To Arms" has the threat of a dangerous solar flare actually hit Mars instead of Earth like the people on the latter planet thought, causing the methane pockets to ignite and blast Mars out of its orbit. It just narrowly avoids colliding with the Earth before leaving.
• Invader Zim: "Planet Jackers" has the threat be the titular Planet Jackers moving the Earth while putting up a fake sky so nobody notices and throw it into their dying sun in order to sustain it like kindle to the fireplace. It doesn't seem to occur to them that they could just move their own homeworld around a healthy star instead.
• Justice League Unlimited: "The Return" sees Amazo making his way back towards Earth, apparently for revenge against Lex Luthor. The planet Oa is directly in his path and he apparently vaporizes it, much to the horror of John Stewart and the League. At the end of the episode, as the crisis is resolved, Green Lantern is still upset about this, but Amazo admits he never destroyed Oa, merely moved it as it had been in his way. At John's insistence, the android puts the planet back.
• Miraculous Ladybug: In "Stormy Weather 2", the epinomous Akumatization uses her Weather Manipulation powers to create a super large volcano in Paris that works as a jet engine to push Earth further away from the sun, with the ultimate goal of freezing all life on the planet.
• Packages from Planet X: The episode "Astro-Blasters" has Dan be given an alien telescope that has the power to relocate astral bodies, which is done by looking through it at whatever the user wishes to manipulate. Planets, moons, stars, the telescope can move all of them.
• In the Rick and Morty episode "Get Schwifty", the planet Earth is teleported away by a giant floating head as part of a song competition. Rick is contacted by the President of the United States to try to do something about this, as any planet that doesn't impress the judges is exploded.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: An early reveal in the show's run is that Etheria has somehow wound up in a different dimension, hence why there are no stars in the night sky despite there being legends based around said stars. Season 4 reveals the planet was indeed teleported from its original orbit by Mara, the previous She-Ra in an attempt to protect its magic from misuse by the First Ones, who had turned the planet into a weapon. The season ends with Etheria being put back into place, just in time for Horde Prime's forces to surround the planet in preparation for its conquest.
• In the Superman: The Animated Series episode "Little Girl Lost: Part 1", when Superman goes to the remnants of Krypton, he detects a distress signal from a nearby planet called Argo. When he gets there, discovers he finds a message from a scientist named Kala In-Ze pleading for help and explains that the explosion that destroyed Krypton devastated Argo's surface and pushed the planet out of orbit, away from their sun. Far from their sun, Argo's people slowly froze to death in the ensuing ice age, until only she and her family remained. Superman finds that the stasis chambers malfunctioned, with the exception of one, which contained Kara, aka: Supergirl.
• In Time Jam: Valerian & Laureline, this is how the Earth disappeared: it was part of a conspiracy from Tancarville to rule the Universe.
• The Transformers: The three part episode "The Ultimate Doom" has Megatron succeed in creating a space bridge large enough to teleport Cybertron to Earth to harvest Energon from the gravitational conflict formed from Cybertron being in orbit around Earth. The worst part? He managed to get Optimus Prime to complete the teleportation by convincing him that Cybertron would be destroyed instead of Earth if the process isn't completed.

Real Life

• Mercury is believed to have been located much further out originally, but was knocked to its current orbit by a glancing collision with another early planet or planetoid. This is supported by the fact that Mercury's crust is unusually thin, suggesting it had a lot of material blasted off during its formation. See Nova's episode "The Planets: Inner Worlds" for more information.
• One of the other hypotheses regarding the formation of the inner Solar System is the "grand tack hypothesis", that Jupiter formed at a distance of about 3.5 astronomical units from the Sun, then shifted to a "lower" orbit of about 1.5 AU at one point and absorbed much of the planet formation material from the inner system, then was pulled back to its current location at 5.2 AU by gravity effects from the formation of Saturn. This largely stopped the accretion of material onto the inner planets, preventing the formation of any "super-Earths" (oversized rocky planets which have been discovered to be quite common around other stars) and causing Mars to remain too small to keep its core molten, causing its geomagnetic field to collapse and dooming any life that may have formed there.
• As time goes on, the sun will get hotter and the habitable zone will move past Earth's current orbit. It is suggested that Earth can be moved to a more distant orbit by "pulling" Earth with redirected asteroids set on a near Earth pass. The problems with this plan are that these asteroids would have to pass very close to the Earth, be significantly large, AND we would have to do this hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of times and not accidentally hit the planet with an extinction level asteroid.
• Using celestial bodies for gravity assists actually slows them down very slightly, in obedience to Newton's third law, which alters their orbit via Kepler's laws. Though as Randall Munroe explains here, it's not by a noticeable amount because planets are simply so massive compared to spacecraft: the New Horizon probe's slingshot around Jupiter gained the probe a velocity change of about 4 kilometers per second, while Jupiter only lost about a zettameter^note 10^-21 meters per second of velocity.

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