Rogue giant eight times bigger than Jupiter crashed the solar party, making some planets wonky

The ancient universe was a chaotic place, with rocky material slamming into each other left, right and centre. Our solar system was no exception. But once it all calmed down, all the planets fell into their place. But scientists have been puzzled about the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that do not move in the same type of elliptical orbit as Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Their orbits are a little more elliptical and tilted. The four gas giants also emerged from the protoplanetary disk on the same plane as the rest of the planets. So then why are they not moving like the other planets? Scientists seem to think something pushed them from their paths. Till now, it was assumed that certain complex dynamics caused this to happen, such as gravitational interactions or migration through the protoplanetary disk. But they did not explain the specific pattern of eccentricities and inclinations observed. Now, a new study suggests that an intruder, around eight times Jupiter's mass, raced through the solar system, leading the giant planets to shift trajectory. Also Read: 'Other Atlas', the golden comet, breaks apart as it zooms towards Earth

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Garett Brown, Hanno Rein, and Renu Malhotra propose in a new study that this object was not a star, but something called a substellar object, a rogue planet or brown dwarf. It had nothing holding it, and it raced through our star system billions of years ago, Universe Today reported. They ran over 50,000 computer simulations, each with a time period of 20 million years, and changed this cosmic intruder's mass, speed, and trajectory. Most solar systems that they threw up were nothing like ours, and only one per cent of simulations showed that a single encounter changed the orbits of these four giant planets.

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Massive rogue body reshaped the solar system

The one that nailed it involved an object eight times the mass of Jupiter, which came within 1.7 astronomical units of the Sun, moving at a speed of one and three kilometres per second. This flyby caused a gravitational disturbance which changed the eccentricities and tilted their orbital planes, causing them to move in the wobbly orbits we see today. They estimated that there is roughly a one in 9,000 chance that such an encounter happened during the lifetime of our solar system.

However, this encounter did not affect the inner four planets, including Earth, in any way. Rocky planets continued to move around as they were, with no change in their orbital characteristics. Which means that nothing changed on Earth because of this trespasser. Rogue cosmic bodies are fairly common in the universe. This study shows how they have the ability to change the architecture of star systems, and this might be why the exoplanet systems discovered in the past are different from each other.