While our Solar System is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old, just what was happening during all that time remains something of a mystery, with new finds and data constantly tweaking the accepted theories.
With the release of a new article on Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, new information about the early habits of our largest planet Jupiter may remold how we look at the evolution of the Solar System.
The two researchers, Gregory Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology have reimagined how our early Solar System may have been arranged and how Jupiter played a part in its current set-up.
Imagine that the earlier inner Solar System was crowded with debris and a number of planets called “super-Earths”. These have a larger mass than our Earth but are not necessarily habitable. The two astronomers ran the numbers and believe that Jupiter may have deviated from its outer orbit and moved in closer to the Sun.
This in turn disrupted the orbits of those super-Earths, causing them to careen into the Sun. With the formation of Saturn, Jupiter was the pull away from the Sun to its current orbit.
The upshot of all this moving around? Without Jupiter to clear the previous planets, there would have been no room for Earth as we know it.
Laughlin uses this data to compare or Solar System with others, to understand why we have so many rocky planets, such as Earth and Mars, comparatively close to the Sun.
“Now that we can look at our own solar system in the context of all these other planetary systems, one of the most interesting features is the absence of planets inside the orbit of Mercury,” said Laughlin, in a news release from UC Santa Cruz.
If the data and computer simulations are correct, it could move theories to assume that planets similar to Earth are far rarer than expected. If the formation of super-Earths are the norm, does that imply that it takes an event such as the one described above to create the perfect atmosphere for a habitable planet?
At any rate, we can all thank the largest planet in our Solar System for its early mischievous behavior.
