Scientists believe that a chance encounter with a passing star could save our Earth, which will no longer be habitable in about a billion years. Because the Earth is very hot, the rescue process is accomplished by ejecting the star into a cooler orbit, or helping it to escape from the solar system completely, according to a new theoretical study.
The term rogue stars describes stars that have been ejected from their solar systems and are now traveling through interstellar space. Although these stars are very rare, they pose a potential threat to planets in their path.
According to the new study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and arXiv, this threat could be a saving grace for Earth hundreds of millions of years from now.
According to the British newspaper The Sun, the study team produced 12,000 simulations, and in some of them, the passage of the star pushed Earth into a farther, cooler orbit, and in other cases, our planet (along with some or all of the other planets) landed in the Oort cloud. It is a massive spherical cloud that is believed to surround the solar system (at the edge of the solar system), and extends for a distance of 3 light-years.
