Invisible force zoomed through solar system and threw off objects from their orbit

A report on Earth.com suggests that the boundaries of our solar system were stretched by a strange force, something that flew by. Astrophysicist Susanne Pfalzner of Forschungszentrum Jülich, has discovered that a stellar flyby caused the occurrence and the edges of the solar system are beyond where they once were.

Pfalzner notes that several objects beyond the orbit of Neptune move on eccentric orbits.

“Several thousand celestial bodies are known to move beyond the orbit of Neptune,” said Pfalzner. “Surprisingly, many of these so-called trans-Neptunian objects move on eccentric orbits that are inclined relative to the common orbital plane of the planets in the solar system.“

Pfalzner and her student, Amith Govind and Simon Portegies Zwart from Leiden University, say that some force might have lifted trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) from the disk where they originally formed and altered their orbits.

To learn more about what could have moved these objects from their orbits, the team conducted 3,000 simulations. They tried to understand whether another star caused this to happen.

They found that this was a possibility and a close flyby of another star is likely to blame for the way the TNOs move. The researchers added that this star might also be responsible for the movement of some known TNOs, such as the dwarf planet Sedna which was discovered in 2003.

Other objects with bizarre orbits are 2008 KV42 and 2011 KT19 which move almost perpendicular to Neptune's orbit.

“The best match for today’s outer solar system is a star slightly lighter than our Sun – about 0.8 solar masses,” Govind said.

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“This star passed our Sun at a distance of around 16.5 billion kilometres – about 110 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or just under four times the distance to Neptune.”

Implications for future studies

The finding has opened up a new avenue for astronomers to understand how stellar flybys affect other bodies, and whether these might have shaped the orbits of celestial bodies residing in our solar system and beyond.

Flybys of other similar stars might have led some trans-Neptunian objects to be flung towards the inner solar system to become the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

“Some of these objects could have been captured by the giant planets as moons,” said Portegies Zwart. “This would explain why the outer planets of our solar system have two different types of moons.”