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Scientists and philosophers have been concerned for centuries about the final end of the Solar System. Astronomers now know that our Sun will turn into a dead rock mass in a thousand trillion years.
And long before that, perhaps 100 billion years from now, the planets of the Solar System will have drifted away across the galaxy.
Jon Zink of the University of California, Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan have now joined forces to predict what exactly will happen when the Solar System meets its demise.
The trio said: “Understanding the long-term dynamic stability of the solar system constitutes one of the oldest researches in astrophysics, going back to Newton himself, who hypothesized that the mutual interactions between the planets would eventually lead to the unstable system.” .
However, trying to solve what is known as the N-body problem is extraordinarily complicated, as the more bodies interact with each other in a system, the more difficult it is to predict.
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“Given enough time, some of these close passages will get close enough to dissociate – or destabilize – the remaining planets.”
With these additional influences taken into account in their calculations, the team ran 10 N-body simulations for the outer planets, using the powerful shared Hoffman2 cluster.
These were divided into two phases: up to the end of the Sun’s mass loss and the consequential phase.
Although 10 is a rather weak statistical sample, the researchers found a similar scenario that occurs every time.
After the Sun completes its evolution into a white dwarf – the remnant of a star’s stellar core – the outer planets have a larger orbit but remain relatively stable.
However, Jupiter and Saturn appear to be caught in a stable 5: 2 resonance – for every five times Jupiter orbits the Sun, Saturn orbits twice.
These expanded orbits, as well as the characteristics of planetary resonance, make the system more susceptible to the perturbations of the passage of the stars.
For this reason, after 30 billion years, this can eventually create chaotic orbits, resulting in a rapid loss of the planet.
Eventually, 100 billion years after the Sun turned into a white dwarf, the Solar System finally came to an end.
This is, therefore, a much shorter time frame than that proposed in 1999, but the researchers are careful to emphasize whether this remains subject to current observations of the local galactic environment and stellar overflight estimates, which could change both. .
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