New Study Suggests Astronomical Encounters Shaped Solar System Formation and Earth’s Orbit

Astronomical encounters may have played a more serious role in the formation of the Solar System, the Earth’s orbit and the living environment than we thought until now. The Astrophysical Journal LettersAccording to a recent study published in

Space is mostly empty and there are huge distances, while the Milky Way is a populated and bustling galaxy in which stars move on different paths and at different speeds, and from time to time they can come close to us.

This is important because geographic data show that deviations in the Earth’s orbit have caused atmospheric anomalies, and it would be important to know the orbit of the Earth during such episodes

– pointed out the author of the research, Nathan Kaib, scientific associate of the Planetary Science Institute.

Another player in the fateful encounter may have been a Sun-like star, HD-7977, which passed near the Solar System 2.8 million years ago. Its distance was 31,000 astronomical units, or 31,000 times the Sun-Earth distance. According to less conservative estimates, the star could be much closer, up to 4000 AU.

The giant planets of the Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn, exert a serious gravitational influence on the Earth. According to Kaib’s calculations, the impact of HD-7977 was indirect and primarily affected our planet by interfering with the movement of the giants. The resulting changes took place over millions of years.

It won’t be like that

Such encounters are probably not rare. On average, the Sun comes closer than 50,000 astronomical units to a star every one million years, and every 10 million years a much more confidential encounter takes place at a distance of around 10,000 astronomical units.

Kaib and his colleagues found that, by projecting this trend back, parallels between past encounters and changes in Earth’s climate can be found. An example of this could be the geohistorical event called the Plaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum 55 million years ago, when thousands of gigatons of carbon were released into the atmosphere, the average temperature increased by 8 degrees, the temperature in Antarctica was 15 degrees, and the sea was 40 degrees off the coast of Africa. According to experts, this could be explained by an encounter event that made the planet’s orbit extreme and unpredictable.

Turning back the history of the Solar System, of course, there is more and more uncertainty in the story. Currently, HD-7977 is the only one that has come identifiably close to the Solar System. According to experts, it is important to take the interstellar environment into account in the models used to describe the evolution of the Earth.

(BGR, Futurism)

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2024-02-27 20:10:00
#nearby #star #knocked #Earth #orbit