“The Chaos and Stability of Planetary Orbits: Research Explains Why the Inner Solar System Remains Intact”

Jakarta –

Did you know that the orbits in the inner solar system, namely Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are actually chaotic and the planets should have collided with each other.

However, written on the page Live Sciencethrough research published in Physical Review Xexplains why the stability of the planet has been maintained until now and the Earth still exists today.

Come on, let’s look at the information!

Planetary Motion Cannot Be Predicted

The gravity possessed by each planet is known to cause them to continue to attract each other. The slight pull exerted by the planet causes a small adjustment to the planet’s orbit.

However, the orbital alignment only occurs for the planets of the inner solar system. This is because the outer planets have stronger resistance so that they maintain relatively stable orbits.

Therefore, problems related to the trajectories of planets in the inner solar system are still too complex to be solved accurately. As the mathematician Henri Poincare proved at the end of the 19th century.

He found that it was mathematically impossible to solve the equations governing the motions of three or more interacting objects or what is often known as the ‘three body problem’.

This causes the uncertainty in the details of the planet’s initial position and velocity to grow larger over time resulting in three scenarios for the distances between the planets.

The first scenario allows that the distances between Mercury, Venus and Earth differ only slightly. Another possible scenario is that the planets will collide with each other. The last scenario is likely that the planets will move away from each other.

The time it takes for two nearly identical paths for them to begin to deviate by a certain amount is known as Lyapunov time.

Jacques Laskar, an astronomer and research director at the National Center for Scientific Research and the Paris Observatory, and one of the authors of the study in 1989, calculated that Lyapunov’s time for the orbits of the inner planets of the solar system to be only 5 million years.

“That means you’re basically losing one digit every 10 million years,” Warriors told Live Science.

For example if the initial uncertainty in the position of the planet is 15 meters, 10 million years later this uncertainty will be 150 meters and after 100 million years, 9 additional digits are lost, giving an uncertainty of 150 million kilometers or the equivalent of the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Therefore, Laskar added that basically we don’t know where the planet is. The solar system has been around for more than 4.5 billion years, but it’s rare for such a dramatic event as a planetary collision or a planet being ejected from the solar system. It makes scientists confused.

Warriors then, simulated the planet’s trajectory in the next five billion years. He found there was only a 1% chance of a planetary collision. Using the same approach, he found it would take about 30 billion years for one of the planets to collide with each other.

Barriers Found Over Planetary Chaos

Through mathematical analysis, Laskar and colleagues then identified the presence of “symmetry” or “amount of wakefulness” in gravitational interactions. It is this factor that creates a practical barrier in the uncertain motions of the planets.

The quantity of “symmetry” that appears is nearly constant. They inhibit certain chaotic motions that could lead to the instability of the solar system. However, this inhibition does not completely prevent planets from colliding with each other.

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 this study were. He added that the orbits of the planets of our solar system show very weak chaos.

Another study, conducted by Laskar and his colleagues, looked for clues as to whether the number of planets in the solar system was once different from what we know today.

In addition, they are also exploring whether the stability we see today always existed for the billions of years before life developed.

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(pal/pal)