(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists at the University of Toronto in Canada have uncovered the devastating consequences of an alien star approaching the solar system.
This may not have an immediate effect on the fate of the planets, but it will increase the risk of orbit destabilization over the next five billion years by an order of magnitude.
The results of the study were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the preprint is available in the arXiv repository.
The researchers simulated 2,880 stellar flybys of the solar system along random hyperbolic trajectories, analyzing the effects of perturbing the orbits of the outer planets up to 4.8 billion years after the flyby.
All simulations were divided into a control group (960 simulations), where the perturbations are too small, and an experimental group (1920 simulations), where the perturbations are distinguishable against the background of digital noise.
In the first group, four simulations ended with Mercury colliding with Venus; of the second, Mercury collided with Venus in 20 simulations, Earth collided with Mars in one, Uranus left the solar system in two, Neptune did it in one, and Mercury in another.
Scientists have shown that the passages of stars do not significantly affect the stability of the solar system, if the deviation of the orbit of Neptune does not exceed 0.1 percent.
If we consider stellar environments similar to the vicinity of the Sun, then passages that can lead to strong disturbances occur no more than once every 100 billion years.
However, for planetary systems located in denser galactic environments, such flybys are much more likely and occur during the life of the system, significantly influencing orbital configurations.
Disturbances in the orbit of the outer planets are transmitted to the rest of the large bodies, increasing the likelihood of destabilization of the inner part of the planetary system due to secular resonances.
. If the relative perturbations of the semi-major axis of Neptune’s orbit still exceed 0.1 percent, then the probability of destabilization will increase by an order of magnitude within five billion years.
With a deviation of the semi-major axis of the orbit of Neptune by 10 percent (corresponding to almost three astronomical units), instability manifests itself in one hundred percent of cases.
Such a scenario can lead to the passage of a star with the mass of the Sun at a distance of 250 astronomical units at a speed of 20 kilometers per second.
Scientists have also studied the evolution of star-planetary systems, which are influenced by several spans, going one after another.
The resulting effect is reminiscent of Levy flights, where the system makes a series of short moves in a random direction, but long moves occur in between. Similarly, the orbits of the planets evolve not due to a series of small perturbations, but due to a large perturbation that exceeds a certain critical force.
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