The Sun is a fiery but orderly dictator that has been organizing our star system for over billions of years through powerful gravity. All the planets orbit around it in the same plane and in the same direction. However, some anomalies in the planets’ orbits lead astronomers to speculate that they may have been perturbed by external factors in the distant past.
New research suggests that a huge interstellar object with 50 times the mass of Jupiter could be responsible for such perturbations. Such an object flying through the Solar System could shift the orbits of the planets, demonstrating that even the Sun cannot fully protect the system from external factors.
The Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago from a protoplanetary disk, a flat cloud of gas around the young Sun. This structure explains why the planets move in the same direction and stay in coplanar orbits. However, over the epochs, they have changed their location due to a phenomenon called “planetary migration”. For example, Uranus and Neptune are estimated to have formed closer to the Sun than they are now, and some planets may have been ejected from the system altogether.
Until now, migration was thought to be caused by the interaction of gravitational forces between the planets and the influence of the protoplanetary disk. However, the orbits of the gas giants – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – exhibit eccentricities that cannot be fully explained by these theories. Therefore, the hypothesis of external influence arose.
The researchers suggest that the large interstellar object, with a mass ranging from 2 to 50 Jupiter masses, could have passed at a distance of about 20 a.u. from the Sun (20 times the distance between Earth and the Sun). This approach could have caused gravitational disturbances that affected the orbits of the planets. Computer modeling results show the probability of this scenario as 1 in 100.
What kind of object is this? One suggestion is that it is a gas giant expelled from its star system. Its journey may have left its mark on our system, adding to the mystery of its history.
Earlier we reported on how many times the planets orbited the Sun in 4.5 billion years.
Provided by universetoday.com
