Scientists suggest that gas giants may collide quite often in the early stages of star system formation. Astronomers ran simulations of such a situation and found that one giant planet would form as a result, but traces of this grand event on it would still be detectable in millions of years.
Chaos of young star systems
How often do planets collide? As scientists have found, in old star systems that have been around for billions of years, it almost never happens. But the newly born can do absolutely anything. There is chaos there in general, the scale of which can be seen by looking at the surface of the Moon, which has preserved the traces of those ancient collisions.
Young star systems are crowded with planetesimals that were left over after the formation of planets. They fall on them, enriching them with various minerals. And most of these events are likely to occur not with relatively small planets like Earth, but with gas giants like Jupiter.
Some of them may have metallic cores 100-300 times the mass of our planet. Recently, scientists have suggested: could such an anomaly be explained not by hundreds of falls of small bodies at all, but only one, but really large-scale collision?
Collision of the gas giants
What happens if two gas giants collide in the early stages of star system formation? That’s the question researchers have attempted to answer in a new paper. Thus they took not a fictional gas giant, but a real planet, Beta Pictoris b.
It is interesting for several reasons at once. First, because of its proximity to Earth, second, because of its huge mass (13 times the size of Jupiter), third, it is a very young world, 12-20 million years old.
Scientists decided to observe what would happen if a much smaller gas giant with a mass of 17 Earth masses crashed into it. In other words, about the same as Neptune. According to the modeling, the large planet survived the collision but received grand seismic shaking.
These fluctuations remained visible even from a great distance for millions of years. So if we study other star systems in the future, we can find traces of such cataclysms quite easily.
According to phys.org
