Scientists have warned that if a transiting star moved Neptune’s orbit by just 0.1 percent, the resulting chaos could cause other planets in our solar system to collide.
Research presented in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyshowed that a “stellar flyby” — a relatively common event in the universe — was enough to send other planets off each other.
It is possible that if Mercury and Jupiter’s perihelion – the point at which the planets reach closest to the Sun – coincide, two possibilities could occur. Mercury can be pulled out of its orbit and shot out of the solar system or into a collision course with Venus, the Sun, or Earth.
These changes will occur over millions of years, but the researchers have simulated the situation about 3,000 times.
In nearly 2,000 of them, 26 eventually shattered the planets together, expelling Uranus, Neptune, or Mercury from the solar system altogether.
“The extent to which asterism plays an important role in the evolution of planetary systems remains an active area of research. For planetary systems that form in star clusters, the consensus is that stellar flight plays an important role while planetary systems remain within star clusters,” Garrett Brown, graduate student in Computational Physics in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences (PES) at the University of Toronto, said in a statement. Universe Today.
“This is usually the first 100 million years of planetary evolution. After the star cluster disappeared, the incidence of star fly decreased dramatically, reducing its role in the evolution of planetary systems.”
Also, given the likelihood that the Sun will expand and engulf the planet in five billion years, the possibility that this will interfere with our experience in the solar system “isn’t an issue we should be concerned about,” Brown said.
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