Simulates the concept of a celestial body (large image) and a combination of several planets of the solar system
Photos: NASA, ESA, Caltech
According to the report posted above arXivco-author Renu Malhotra, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson (USA), hypothesized that a giant celestial body, 8 times more massive than Jupiter, could have crashed through the solar system a long time ago. about 4 billion years.
This may explain the strange characteristics of the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which are not perfectly circular and all lie on slightly different planes.
In the report, the researchers describe how they modeled the orbits of a group of four planets in the outer solar system and performed 50,000 simulations of the likelihood of a large object passing through the solar system. , according to Live Science.
The goal is to determine whether an outside force once entered the solar system and disturbed the planet’s orbit.
While the majority of simulations resulted in a solar system that was very different from today’s, about 1% resulted in planets with orbital morphology very similar to what is currently happening.
Accordingly, the orbits of the four planets were interfered with by the passage of a celestial body from 2 to 50 times the mass of Jupiter. This mass range can include planets to brown dwarfs.
Brown dwarfs are celestial bodies with more mass than planets but smaller than stars. They are sometimes classified as “spray stars” because they are not large enough to sustain nuclear fusion of hydrogen.
When further simulations were performed, this time including the orbits of the inner planet group (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars), the researchers found the most likely scenario is a celestial body eight times more massive than Jupiter passing as close to the sun as Mars’s current orbit.
Therefore, the team of scientists believes that the strange orbit of the planet group outside the solar system is probably the result of an intrusion by a mysterious celestial body.
