Problem of the Day
Sun is a kind but kind tyrant. For billions of years, it has kept our star in good order through its powerful gravitational force. All the planets orbit it in about the same plane, and it also moves in the same direction.
Even so, there are a few anomalies in the formation of our star system that cannot be fully explained by the Sun’s rule, some astronomers argue, because it seems that the paths of the planets have been changed at some point in the past.
Now, a new peer-reviewed study shows that it’s a big thing for the stars to reach fifty times more of Jupiter may have played a role in awakening the planets from their original paths – suggesting that perhaps not even the Sun can protect us from the chaos caused by aliens.
The work includes other studies that have suggested interstellar flybys to explain eccentricities in the orbits of other objects in the sun.
Ebb and Flow
The solar system is about 4.6 billion years old. Astronomers believe that about 100 million years into its existence, the planets began to form in a rotating, flat cloud of gas surrounding the rising Sun known as the protoplanetary disk. This explains why all the planets in a coplanar orbit are with each other and rotate in the same direction.
However, they didn’t stick around, and a phenomenon called planetary migration was developed by astronomers to account for how some planets ended up in unexpected places. Uranus and Neptune, for example, are thought to have formed closer to the Sun than where their orbits lie, while other planets in the formation were taken out of the system entirely.
Until now, the prevailing theory of this disturbance was that it was caused by the gravitational interaction between the planets, which can push and pull each other from their original positions, and then the influence of the protoplanetary disk itself, which can sweep inchoate. world and leave them somewhere else.
Space Invader
However, a few wrinkles remain. The movements of the gas giants – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – show surprising eccentricities that researchers argue are not satisfactorily explained by current migration theories.
So maybe it wasn’t just internal processes that caused today’s modification, but something bigger was blowing through our star system. Researchers have calculated that if an object between two and fifty times the mass of Jupiter flew within 20 miles of the star – which is 20 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth – of the center of the solar system, it could explain the amazing ways we see today.
Through computer simulations, the researchers estimate that the probability of this happening is 1 in 100 – which is quite possible in this field.
What that could have been, however, is anyone’s guess. Maybe it was a gas giant ejected from its own star, coming to destroy ours. Wouldn’t that be poetic?
More about the area: Cornell Astronomer Hopes James Webb Will Confirm Alien Life in 2025