Scientists have informed and warned that the planets in our solar system might crash if Neptune's orbit is altered by only 0.1 percent by a passing star.
The research, which was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shows that a "stellar flyby" - a relatively typical occurrence in the cosmos - might be enough to cause planets to collide.
If Mercury and Jupiter's perihelion — the moment at which the planets are closest to the Sun — occur simultaneously, two outcomes are possible. Mercury's orbit might be perturbed, causing it to either make an exit from the Solar System or collide with Venus, the Sun, or the Earth.
These changes will occur over millions of years, but the researchers recreated the condition around three thousand times.
In over 2,000 of them, 26 concluded with the planets colliding, or Uranus, Neptune, or Mercury are entirely exited from the Solar System.
“The extent that celestial flybys play in the evolution of planetary systems is still an active site of study. For planetary systems that form in a star cluster, the consensus is that celestial flybys play a vital role while the planetary system remains within the star cluster”, Garett Brown, a senior graduate of computational physics from the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences (PES) at the University of Toronto.
“After the star cluster disappear the occurrence rate of stellar flybys dramatically decreases, reducing their role in the evolution of planetary systems.”
In addition to it, given that the Sun will certainly expand and swallow the Earth in five billion years, the possibility that this would disturb our experience in the Solar System is "not an issue we need to worry about," according to Brown.
Reference(s): Peer-Reviewed Research
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