Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
Credit: NASA/JPL
A massive planetary object may have passed through our solar system 4 billion years ago.
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None of the eight planets have perfectly circular orbits or lie on the same orbital plane.
Renu Malhotra, planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, co-authored the study.
Credit: University of Arizona
Researchers conducted 50,000 simulations to explore how a visitor altered planetary paths.
The interloper ranged from two to 50 times Jupiter’s mass, possibly a substellar body.
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Simulations revealed some objects came as close as 1.69 AU from the sun, near Mars' orbit.
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In 1% of cases, flybys changed outer planets’ orbits to match their current trajectories.
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Substellar bodies like brown dwarfs are abundant, suggesting such flybys might be common.
Additional simulations showed the visitor affected both outer and terrestrial planets.
The study was shared in the arXiv preprint database in December, sparking fresh theories.