A team of astronomers has studied a new theory that attempts to predict what would happen if a star descended towards planet Earth, and that it might save it about a billion years from now, when the latter would become very hot and uninhabitable due to the Sun growing larger and hotter.
Therefore, the researchers explained that it is likely that this star will be able to push the Earth out of its orbit and return to a cooler region. The wandering stars that were pushed from our solar systems into space are lined up, and they are reported to be very rare and may pose a potential threat to the planets.
In this context, Earth is located in the habitable zone in our solar system, which is the distance from the star at which liquid water can exist on the surfaces of the planets that orbit around it, according to what was reported by the website. The Sun.
But the sun has formed a red giant that will automatically get hotter until it completely destroys the Earth within the next five billion years. This sparked the curiosity of scientists to study the possibility of removing the Earth from its orbit to become a free planet.
In detail, the scientists came across some interesting scenarios. This is not the first simulation they have done, as there have been 12,000 simulations.
In some of these processes, Earth was nudged into a cooler orbit, but in others, our planet ended up in the Oort Cloud, the spherical layer of icy bodies surrounding the Sun.
What is striking is that the Earth was exposed to the gravity of this star in other simulations.
However, even with this very small chance of a wandering star appearing in Earth’s orbit, Earth would still have only a 1 in 35,000 chance of survival.