What would happen if another planet existed between Mars and Jupiter

As we know, there is an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. However, many people wonder if there was once a planet there and what our Solar System would have looked like then. Recently, scientists have modeled such a situation.

Solar System. Source: phys.org

Planet between Mars and Jupiter

Recently, Emily Simpson and Howard Chen of the Florida Institute of Technology published a study on how the Solar System would change if there was a planet between Mars and Jupiter. 

The asteroid belt is known to be located in that place. However, many people believe that there was once a planet there. Scientists, indeed, proved long ago that it wasn’t. But could it have been there, and how would it affect the rest of the Solar System?

The fact is that all bodies that orbit the Sun interact with each other due to gravitational forces. And that the planets have stable orbits is the result of the fact that over millions of years of their evolution they have taken positions where the influence of all the objects around them is compensated. And adding another planet would add chaos to this system.

Simulation

And how much a planet between Mars and Jupiter would really affect the rest of the bodies is what a new study has tried to find out. The authors created a mathematical model of such a system and ran numerous simulations that showed its evolution over two million years. 

During the simulations, the scientists studied five planets of different sizes that were placed between Mars and Jupiter. The smallest of them had a mass of 1% of the Earth’s mass, the largest had 10 times the Earth’s mass. In addition, scientists changed their orbital inclination and eccentricity.

The simulations showed that the evolution of the system depended on the mass of the added planet in a rather interesting way. If it is as big as Mars or smaller, then changes in other parameters have little effect on the stability of the orbits of the other planets, except that the real Mars may wobble but still stay in its orbit.

With a planetary mass of 1-2 Earths, the tilt of our planet’s axis of rotation could increase. This would lead to colder winters and hotter summers. However, the internal system would have remained stable overall, even though the extra planet would have been quite massive.

However, in the case of a planet ten times more massive than Earth, the tilt of the rotation axes and eccentricities of the orbits of the inner planets could increase catastrophically, leading to the establishment of a climate problematic for the existence of life. 

All of the above is interesting in terms of the question of how typical our Solar System is. The statistics of discovered exoplanets show that it is indeed unusual. The orbits of our planets are very wide and at the same time we don’t have a super-Earth.

But the simulations that have been done show that it can indeed be very out of the box. And the lack of a super-Earth could be the reason. Maybe that’s what allows life to exist on Earth.

According to phys.org

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