“New Research Reveals Why Apocalypse Hasn’t Hit Earth Yet Despite Chaotic Planetary Orbits”

Jakarta –

Earth maybe there won’t be today. That’s because the orbits of the inner Solar System planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are chaotic, and models show that these inner planets should have apocalypse as they collide with each other now. But that hasn’t happened yet.

Recent research, published May 3 in the journal Physical Review X, may finally shed some light on why. Through a deep dive into models of planetary motion, the researchers found that the motion of the inner planets is constrained by certain parameters that act as a tether holding back the system’s chaos.

In addition to providing a mathematical explanation for the alignment shown in Solar system us, the new study’s insights can help scientists understand the trajectories of exoplanets around other stars.

Unpredictable planet

Planets are constantly tugging on each other’s gravity, and this slight pull keeps making tiny adjustments to the planet’s orbit. The outer planets, which are much larger, are more resilient to the slightest tug and so maintain relatively stable orbits.

The trajectories of the inner planets, however, are too complicated to work out precisely. In the late 19th century, the mathematician Henri Poincaré proved that it was mathematically impossible to solve the equations governing the motion for three or more interacting objects, often known as the ‘three body problem’.

As a result, uncertainties in the details of the planet’s initial position and velocity ballooned over time. In other words, it is possible to take two scenarios: the distances between Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth differ only slightly, and in one scenario the planets collide and in the other they veer.

The time required for two paths with nearly identical initial conditions to deviate by a certain amount is known as the Lyapunov time of a chaotic system.

In 1989, Jacques Laskar, astronomer and director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research and the Paris Observatory, calculated Lyapunov’s characteristic time for the orbits of the planets of the inner Solar System to only 5 million years.

“That means you’re basically losing one digit every 10 million years,” Laskar said as quoted by Live Science.

So, for example, the initial uncertainty of the planet’s position is 15 meters, 10 million years later this uncertainty becomes 150 meters. Then after 100 million years, another 9 digits are lost, giving an uncertainty of 150 million kilometers, the equivalent of the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

“Basically you don’t know where the planet is,” said Laskar again.

While 100 million years may seem like a long time, the Solar System is more than 4.5 billion years old, and the absence of dramatic events like planetary collisions or planets being knocked out of all this chaotic motion has long puzzled scientists.

Laskar then looked at the problem in a different way, namely by simulating the trajectory of the inner planet over the next 5 billion years, stepping from one moment to the next.

He found only a 1% chance of planetary collisions. Using the same approach, he calculated that on average it would take about 30 billion years for one of the planets to collide.

Protects from chaos

Delving into the Math, Warriors and his colleagues then identified for the first time a ‘symmetry’ in gravitational interactions that creates a sort of practical barrier protecting against the roaming chaos of planets.

This emerging quantity remains almost constant and inhibits certain chaotic movements, but does not prevent them altogether, just as the raised lip of a dinner plate prevents food from falling from the plate but does not prevent it completely.

Renu Malhotra, Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study, highlighted how subtle the mechanisms identified in the study were.

Malhotra said that it was interesting to know that the orbits of the planets of our Solar System show such weak chaos. In another work, Laskar and colleagues are looking for clues as to whether the number of planets in the Solar System was once different from what we see today.

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(rns/fay)