- 3567 - SOLAR SYSTEM - modeling its formation? Here is a new theory that could help solve a galactic mystery of how our solar system evolved. How did the gas giants -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- end up where they are, orbiting the sun like they do?
--------------------- 3567- SOLAR SYSTEM - modeling its formation?
- Defining orbits is all in the math and our understanding of gravity. We calculate the mass of the Sun with these orbits. We calculate the mass of the planets knowing the circumference of their orbits. It all works except we don’t understand why the smaller rocky planets are orbiting closer to the Sun and the larger gaseous planets are the farthest away?
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- How terrestrial planets such as Earth were formed and the possibility that a fifth gas giant lurks 50 billion miles out into space.
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- Our solar system hasn't always looked the way that it does today. Over its history, the orbits of the planets have changed radically. What happened to gas giants in other solar systems?
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- Stars are born from massive, swirling clouds of cosmic gas and dust. Once our Sun ignited, the early solar system was still filled with a primordial disk of gas that played an integral role in the formation and evolution of the planets, including the gas giants.
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- The gas giants initially circled the sun in neat, compact, evenly-spaced orbits. Jupiter, Saturn and the others, however, they have long settled into orbits that are relatively oblong, askew and spread out. Why is this?
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- The solution posits that there was an instability among these planets, a chaotic set of gravitational interactions that ultimately set them on their current paths. The “Nice model” that was developed is a leading explanation.
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- The Nice model originally thought that the gas giant instability took place hundreds of millions of years after the dispersal of that primordial gas disk that birthed the solar system. But newer evidence, including some found in moon rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions, suggests it happened more quickly. That also raises new questions about how the interior solar system that's home to Earth evolved.
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- A fix has to do with how the instability started. They have proposed a new trigger.
The new theory was the gas giants may have been set on their current paths because of how the primordial gas disk evaporated. That could explain how the planets spread out much earlier in the solar system's evolution than the Nice model originally proposed and perhaps even without the instability to push them there.
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- This research came up with the idea that the giant planets could possibly spread out by a 'rebound' effect as the disk dissipated, perhaps without ever going unstable. This rebound effect idea was tested through extensive simulations of gas disks and large exoplanets -- planets in other solar systems -- that orbit close to their stars.
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- Our solar system is slightly different because Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are distributed on wider orbits. The problem could be solved if the gas disk dissipated from the inside out. This inside-out dissipation provided a natural trigger for the Nice model instability. This ended up strengthening the Nice model rather than destroying it.
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- There's still a nascent sun surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust. A handful of young gas giants revolve around the star in neat, compact orbits through that cloud. As the sun turns on and starts burning its nuclear fuel, it generates sunlight, heating up the disk and eventually blowing it away from the inside out.
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- This created a growing hole in the cloud of gas, centered on the sun. As the hole grew, its edge swept through each of the gas giants' orbits. This transition leads to the requisite giant planet instability with very high probability. The process of shifting these large planets into their current orbits also moves fast compared with Nice model's original timeline of hundreds of millions of years.
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- The instability occurs early as the sun's gaseous disk dissipated, constrained to be within a few million years to 10 million years after the birth of the solar system.
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- This new trigger also leads to the mixing of material from the outer solar system and the inner solar system. The Earth's geochemistry suggests that such a mixing needed to happen while our planet is still in the middle of forming.
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- This new explanation also holds for other solar systems in our galaxy where scientists have observed gas giants orbiting their stars in configurations like what we see in our own.
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- How many planets does our solar system have? Currently, the answer is eight, but it turns out that the Nice model works slightly better when the early solar system had five gas giants instead of four. According to the model, that extra planet was hammer-thrown from our solar system during the instability, which helps the remaining gas giants find their orbits.
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- There may yet be an undiscovered planet tooling around the outskirts of the solar system some 50 billion miles from the sun, about 47 billion miles farther out than Neptune.
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- Humanity should have an answer soon. The Vera Rubin Observatory, scheduled to be operational by the end of 2023, should be able to spot Planet 9 if it is out there. It's a reminder that our solar system is a dynamic place, still full of mysteries and discoveries waiting to be made. We arn’t done yet!
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May 2, 2022 SOLAR SYSTEM - modeling its formation? 3567
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