The solar system is still full of mysteries. But a new study may well explain the trajectory of the planets that compose it.
The universe expanded about 15 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Since then, according to scientific knowledge, making consensus today, he has never ceased to evolve and develop, housing many galaxies, such as the Milky Way and its 100,000 light years (AL) in diameter. And among the hundreds of billions of stars that make it up, we find our solar system and its eight planets.
These balls of matter and gas gravitate around the sun in a movement called “period of revolution”, the duration put by a star to complete a complete tour around another star. But according to a recent study, the orbit of four planets of the solar system would have been changed, billions of years back. The cause? An interstellar visitor, eight times more massive than Jupiter.
For decades, theories around the formation of planets have abound. Only certainty: these stars describe more or less circular orbits at an almost constant speed. Mercury, for example, has the most eccentric and tilted orbit of the solar system. On the other hand, the giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) follow almost perfect trajectories.
But it is more difficult than it seems to explain these differences between the stars, according to Renu Malhotra planetologist at Arizona University in Tucson and co-author of a new study on the subject. This is why the team of scientists has considered a new scenario to resolve the enigma of atypical orbits. For researchers, the furtive passage of an interstellar object would be responsible for this gravitational imbalance. This interstellar object could be a giant exoplanet or a brown dwarf, entry and then out of the solar system 4 billion years ago.
Thanks to their models, they made 50,000 simulations of overflight, changing the mass, speed and proximity to the sun of the cosmic visitor. Result: if most of the scenarios gave an unrecognizable solar system, 1% of them showed that its passage could realign the orbits of the giant planets to bring them back to their current configuration.
The most realistic results involved a behemoth almost eight times more massive than Jupiter, the passage of which would have been enough to modify the trajectory of the giant planets. For the time being, nothing has been recognized by the scientific community, the study must still be assessed by other experts in the field.