Wow!
Cosmic collapse
Have you ever delved into the depths of your intrusive thoughts and wondered how the universe will destroy and chew our little planet for billions of years?
Well, that’s pretty much what scientists Garett Brown and Hanno Rein of the University of Toronto have done for their recent study of what would happen if a neighboring star flew a little too close to our solar system.
While they don’t expect a neighboring star to come through the middle of our system, they analyzed the potentially devastating effects of minor changes in the orbits of the planets in the solar system, caused by a star that gets too close to comfort. a few billion miles away.
Solar simulations
Brown and Rein performed nearly 3,000 simulations with varying degrees of perturbation caused by a possible stellar flyby, examining the subsequent effects up to 4.8 billion years later.
“Until,” because some simulations ended soon when a planet was ejected from the solar system or destroyed. Wow!
The results are quite shocking. The scientists found that only a 0.1 percent change in the distance from Neptune to the Sun could plunge the entire solar system into complete chaos, all because a star was 23 billion miles from the Sun.
To put that number into perspective, Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighboring star, is about 24.8 trillion miles away.
Reigning it
While a complete collapse of the solar system seems like a rather catastrophic event, this type of disappearance could last for billions of years.
“These weak perturbations don’t destroy the solar system immediately, they just move it a little bit and over the next million or billions of years something becomes unstable,” Rein told New Scientist.
Perhaps a little more optimistic, 960 of the simulations resulted in negligible changes.
Also, as the researchers themselves concluded, this kind of thing only happens in our corner of the universe once every 100 billion years or so, and the effects take millions of years to come into play.
In short, it’s an interesting scenario to think about, but not something you’ll have to worry about unless you’re planning to live forever.
READ MORE: A passing star displacing Neptune’s orbit could destroy the solar system [New Scientist]
Learn more about neighboring stars: Scientists discover that the dying star is brutally destroying its unfortunate planets