A new study on what happened to the gas giants of the early Solar System continues to reveal clues related to the legendary Planet Nine.
“Our Solar System has not always been as it is today. Throughout its history, the orbits of the planets have changed completely“ – Associate Professor Seth Jacobson from Michigan State University (USA) and his colleagues from France and China stated.
According to SciTech Daily, this group of scientists has just published a new theory that may help solve the mystery of how the Solar System developed, specifically how the “gas giants” – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and a fifth elusive gas giant referred to as “Planet Nine” – came to occupy their current positions.
The early Solar System, surrounded by a protoplanetary disk full of gas and dust – (Photo: SCITECH DAILY).
We have observed many other planetary systems, where gas giants are much closer to their parent stars than the gas giants in our own world. This presents a mystery.
To address this, the research team revisited the famous Nice model (developed in Nice, France), which shows an instability among these gas giants, a chaotic set of gravitational interactions where the emergence of five new gas giants is sufficient, rather than the four we previously knew.
Newer evidence, recently published in Nature, is based on valuable data found in lunar rocks, showing important information about the “inner Solar System” where the rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars reside.
The results indicate that the rapid evaporation of the protoplanetary disk pushed the gas giants – which initially orbited very close to the Sun – far away. This process occurred as the young Sun “matured,” flared up, and began burning nuclear fuel, heating the protoplanetary disk and blowing it outward, pushing the giants further away.
Based on current orbital models and interactions among the gas giants, it is likely that there were up to five gas giants during that ancient chaotic phase. However, there may now only be four because the strong push from the Sun may have ejected the ninth planet, the outermost one, from the Solar System.
However, it is not ruled out that it still exists but has settled into a very distant orbit – up to 50 billion miles from the Sun, as the original Nice model suggested. Several studies in recent years have also pointed to mysterious interactions that objects at the edge of the Solar System are experiencing, indicating that there must be something large with a strong gravitational pull wandering in the dark beyond.
The “brutal” ejection from the Solar System has allowed a peaceful region to form known as the “inner Solar System,” where four rocky planets were born, three of which lie within the habitable zone: Venus, Earth, and Mars.
According to Associate Professor Jacobson, they did not emphasize the controversial ninth planet in the paper but still wanted to inform the public about it and the new data. He believes humanity will soon have an answer.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory (currently under construction in Chile with the main mission to conduct the “Legacy Survey of Space and Time”), expected to begin operations by the end of 2023, is believed to be capable of detecting signals from Planet Nine if it indeed exists.
