Mystery of a Colossal Cosmic Object Distorting Our Solar System Unveiled!

If you were to accurately adhere to the instructions in An Idiot’s Guide to Making a Solar System, you would ultimately end up with a star encircled by a flat disk of planetary matter revolving in relatively orderly, circular trajectories.

However, the disk of our own Solar System is somewhat distorted, with the trajectories of its planets being slightly inclined and more elliptical than round. What caused this?

It might be that a massive object entered the equation early in the formation of the Solar System, leaving a lasting mark on the planetary orbits before this enigmatic newcomer drifted away.

This theory is proposed in recent work by physicists Garett Brown and Hanno Rein from the University of Toronto, in collaboration with planetary scientist Renu Malhotra from the University of Arizona.

Even considering the correct galactic alignments, the likelihood of this scenario occurring is at best approximately one in 1,000 – well below a definitive explanation, yet still worthwhile to hold onto this hypothesis until corroborating evidence arises.

It is now relatively evident that external objects occasionally spiral towards the Sun’s gravitational field, often gaining enough velocity over vast cosmic distances to be expelled back into the universe. In 2017, the asteroid Oumuamua traversed our Solar System, giving astronomers a perfect chance to reflect on the extensive history of interstellar travelers.

Of course, Oumuamua’s visit was akin to a pebble dropping into a pond. What if a more massive entity were to navigate through the waters of the Solar System?

Brown, Rein, and Malhotra computed the figures, discovering that an object between 2 and 50 times Jupiter‘s mass, curving around the Sun somewhere within Uranus‘s orbit at a velocity that would enable it to escape, might dislocate our gargantuan planets into trajectories akin to those we observe today.

By refining their models through simulating about 50,000 occurrences emerging from a hypothetical cluster of nearby stars, the researchers determined that the optimal match for the bizarre orbits of our planetary companions was a mass slightly exceeding 8 times that of Jupiter, approaching the current orbit of Mars at a speed of 2.69 kilometers per second.

Further simulations regarding close passes into the inner Solar System indicated that one of our own planets might be ejected from the system within the next 20 million years in just 2 percent of scenarios. In all other cases, the inner planets persisted in slightly modified yet still relatively stable orbits.

Although the likelihood of such an event occurring is slim – ranging between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 10,000 – chances for such a roll of the dice may not be rare, given the Milky Way’s abundance of suitable star clusters.

“In essence, we do not need to search for a needle in a haystack to encounter a favorable interaction,” the authors state in a report pending peer review.

With the closest star over 4 light-years away, it is easy to perceive our position in the galaxy as rather solitary. Nonetheless, similar to our own planet, the Sun is on a trajectory that brings it adjacent to other solitary stars and stellar clusters, not to mention the dark, cold planets wandering freely in interstellar space.

What fate awaits our irregular little family of planets in the forthcoming years is uncertain. However, there exists a fleeting possibility that the Solar System may one day find itself even more distorted than it currently is.

This study is accessible on the preprint server, arXiv.

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