The solar system could have a giant ice planet

The sun was once surrounded by a disk of gas, dust and stones.

Over billions of years the debris has accumulated to give us the planets we know today.

The more massive planets like Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, however, played a gravitational tug of war and gave way to the order of the solar system.

Now researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science have run more than 6,000 computer simulations to show what the solar system looked like before the planets took position.

Matt Clement, Carnegie postdoctoral fellow, said, “We now know that there are thousands of planetary systems in our Milky Way alone.

“However, it turns out that the arrangement of the planets in our solar system is very unusual. We therefore use models to decode and replicate the creation processes.

“It’s a bit like trying to find out what happened in the aftermath of a car accident: how fast the cars were going, in which directions and so on.”

Through their simulations, the team found that the final arrangement of Uranus and Neptune, the two planets on the outer edge of the solar system, was determined by the Kuiper belt, a circumstellar disk of planetary debris and comets.

The research also showed that the Kuiper Belt helped “eject an ice giant” that was ejected when the solar system was still forming.

Not only did the team help uncover a potentially lost world, but the search could be used to search for life on other planets.

Dr Clement continued: “This shows that while our solar system is a bit strange, it hasn’t always been this way.

“Having established the effectiveness of this model, we can also use it to study the formation of terrestrial planets, including our own, and possibly inform our ability to search for similar systems that may have the potential to do so elsewhere. to house life. “