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Visitor disrupting the Solar System’s orbit: 4-billion-year-old mystery solved?

byadmin
January 25, 2025

The scientific world is discussing a remarkable hypothesis to solve the mysterious deviation in the orbits of the giant planets in the Solar System; A giant celestial body that passed by the solar system 4 billion years ago may have changed the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Scientists have suggested that a giant celestial body that passed by the solar system 4 billion years ago may have changed the orbits of four planets.
According to the research conducted by astrophysicist Renu Malhotra and her team from the University of Arizona, the orbits of the giant planets in the early periods of the Solar System were closer to a circle. However, today, there is a significant inclination and deviation in the orbits of these planets. To explain this situation, scientists developed the hypothesis of a celestial body passing close to our Solar System billions of years ago.
In the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed and was published on the pre-print platform arXiv, the passage of a giant celestial body through the Solar System was simulated. The researchers conducted more than 50 thousand computer simulations, taking into account the mass, speed and passage distance of the celestial body. Each simulation covered a period of 20 million years.
While most of the simulations produced results that were very different from the current structure of the Solar System, about 1 percent produced results close to the present-day orbits of the giant planets. In these scenarios, the mass of the visitor body ranged from 2 to 50 times that of Jupiter, and some passed as close as Mercury.
In the next stage of the research, more detailed simulations were performed. Accordingly, an object with a mass 8 times that of Jupiter passing as close as the present orbit of Mars may have enabled the giant planets to reach their current orbits. Scientists believe it is more likely that a less massive celestial body than the star caused this change.
Although the new study does not provide a definitive answer to the mysterious deviation in the orbits of the giant planets, it does show that this scenario is a strong candidate among the possibilities. The researchers emphasize that such celestial bodies are more common than stars and that the probability of such a transition affecting the Solar System is quite high.
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