Few people fall asleep with the fear that the Solar System will break up in the near future. But if someone is like that, they can sleep more peacefully now. Bulgarian mathematicians Angel Živkov a Ivajlo Tončev from Sofia University they calculated that the Solar System would remain stable for another 100 thousand years.
This might seem obvious since the Solar System has been in operation for over 4.5 billion years. The problem is that it is a relatively complex system in which a number of bodies interact with each other. And such systems are very difficult to analyze in detail and predict their behavior. Although scientists can use supercomputers and model the behavior of the Solar System many millions of years into the distant future, these are rather simplified models without detailed relationships.
A shorter but more accurate forecast
Živkov and Tončev’s calculations cover a much shorter period of time. At the same time, however, the reliability of their results increased significantly. Thanks to this, we can now be more or less certain that the Solar System will last at least 100 thousand years in its current form. The researchers developed a numerical procedure to describe the orbits of the planets (and Pluto) in the form of 54 differential equations. The computer took care of the rest.
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Zhivkov and Tonchev could not resist the temptation and experimented with the input parameters of the model. They discovered that the behavior of the Solar System is very stable. They are therefore convinced that our planetary system will actually last many times longer than their calculations suggest.
Basically, the only thing that could threaten the solar system is if some very massive body approaches us, for example, a black hole, a neutron star or even a wandering planet. Let’s hope there is no such body nearby. The consequences would be fatal.
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