An interstellar visitor may have changed the course of 4 solar system planets, study suggests
There's the possibility it may have caused a lasting transformation to our cosmic vicinity by altering the orbits of the four outer planets, a new study suggests. The study's conclusions may offer insight into the unusual characteristics of these planets' trajectories.
They appear as a line when viewed from above because the orbits are nearly on the same plane. Yet, none of the eight planets in our solar system, including Earth, have perfectly round orbits. Moreover, the planets' paths do not precisely align in the same plane.
A planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a co-author of the paper in question.
According to a recent email to Live Science, "one of the long-standing challenges in theoretical astrophysics has been to understand the mechanism by which the orbits of these planets evolved to be neither excessively eccentric nor excessively coplanar." Malhotra stated that "previous research attempts to explain this phenomenon through planetary interactions have not always aligned with observed orbital characteristics."
An interstellar visitor
To solve this puzzle, Malhotra and her team examined a previously unexplored hypothesis: that a large, visiting star-like object altered the orbits of these planets approximately 4 billion years ago.
Related: Giant "kidney bean"-shaped features have been detected in images captured by a Mars satellite and may indicate the presence of water and signs of life on the red planet.
They also examined situations involving close encounters, concentrating on cases where the unwanted space object reached within 20 astronomical units of the sun. (One astronomical unit is equivalent to about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometres, roughly the distance between the Earth and the sun on average.)
Most simulations had conditions rather distant from the current solar system, but scientists discovered that approximately 1% of these simulations resulted in the visitor's passage having a semblance to our solar system's current state. The bodies that were in alignment with our solar system dived directly into it, passing by Uranus' path and several even brushed past Mercury. Those bodies in question were relatively small in mass, ranging from two to 50 times that of Jupiter.
Objects called "failed stars," also referred to as "failed stars," are unorthodox celestial bodies that are more massive than planets but do not have sufficient mass to sustain the nuclear fusion processes that characterise stars.
The researchers carried out a fresh batch of 10,000 simulations, this time incorporating the terrestrial planets, after multiple close-matching simulations showed the mysterious object passing through the inner solar system.
The most realistic simulation used a super giant eight times as massive as Jupiter, which passed within 1.69 astronomical units of the sun. This is merely further than the average distance of Mars, which orbits the sun at 1.5 astronomical units.
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In the arXiv preprint database during December.
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