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Brighter Side of News
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Jupiter-sized interstellar visitor may have reshaped our solar system
- New research proposes that a single cosmic event, such as a flyby of a massive interstellar object, could provide answers to the mystery about the slightly eccentric and tilted orbits of the Solar System’s gas giants.
- Planetary orbits today reflects billions of years of interactions, as planets coalesced from a rotating disk of gas and dust around the Sun, following conservation of angular momentum shaped their orbits into a flat plane.
- While planet-planet interactions were common, rare visits by interstellar objects likely played pivotal roles in shaping planet formation.
- A study by a team from the University of Toronto suggests that a single encounter with an object between two and fifty times the mass of Jupiter could explain the observed eccentricities and tilts of the Solar System’s giant planets.
- The flyby hypothesis addresses gaps in traditional theories that struggle to explain the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune which deviate from perfect circles and alignments.
- The researchers have found one-in-one-hundred odds that such scenario involving a massive interstellar object passing at a perihelion distance of less than 20 astronomical units would have occurred.
- The flyby hypothesis is a theoretical model that requires further validation and observational campaigns could identify remnants of past interstellar visitors, lending credibility to the theory.
- The recognition of an interconnected galaxy where planets and interstellar objects frequently influence one another could provide a better understanding of potential life-sustaining environments elsewhere in the universe.
- Future research will likely focus on identifying other systems where rogue planets have played similar roles.
- Advances in telescopes and detection methods could reveal more interstellar objects, providing opportunities to study their interactions with established planetary systems.
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