Solar System likely to disintegrate sooner than earlier predictions: Study

Astronomers have been trying to understand the ultimate fate of the Solar System for at least hundreds of years now. In the latest study, researchers tried to study the long-term dynamical stability of the solar system constituted by Newton who speculated that mutual interactions between planets would eventually drive the solar system unstable. 

Researchers have also predicted that in the near future the Sun will die by ejecting a large proportion of its mass before its core contracts down into a white dwarf and as per the new simulations, it will take 100 billion years for any remaining planets to run off across the galaxy, leaving the dying Sun far behind.

According to the researchers, the greater the number of bodies that are involved in a dynamical system, interacting with each other, the more complex that system grows and the harder it is to predict and this is called the 'N-body problem'.

Astronomers Jon Zink of the University of California, Los Angeles, Fred Adams of the University of Michigan and Konstantin Batygin of Caltech in their new paper wrote that understanding the long-term dynamical stability of the solar system constitutes one of the oldest pursuits of astrophysics, tracing back to Newton himself.

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Impossible to make deterministic predictions

The researchers said that due to this complexity, it's impossible to make deterministic predictions of the orbits of Solar System objects past certain timescales.  Adding further, the researchers said if they can figure out what's going to happen to the Solar System in the future it may help in knowing how the universe might evolve, on timescales far longer than its current age of 13.8 billion years.

In 1999, astronomers predicted that the Solar System would slowly fall apart over a period of at least a billion or a quintillion - years. According to Zink's team, this calculation left out some important influences that could disturb the system.

Firstly, the Sun-in about 5 billion years and as it dies, it will swell up into a red giant, engulfing Venus, Mercury and Earth. Then it will eject nearly half its mass, blown away into space on stellar winds; the remaining white dwarf will be around just 54 percent of the current solar mass, according to the researchers. Further, this mass loss will loosen the Sun's gravitational grip on the remaining planets, Mars and the outer gas and ice giants, Saturn, Jupiter Uranus, and Neptune, the study added.

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Stars ought to come close

Secondly, as the Solar System orbits the galactic centre. Other stars ought to come close enough to disturb the planets' orbits, around once every 23 million years, the researchers said. By accounting for stellar mass loss and the inflation of the outer planet orbits, these encounters will become more influential, the researchers added. Given enough time, some of these flybys will come close enough to disassociate or destabilise the remaining planets, the study noted.

After the Sun completes its evolution into a white dwarf, the outer planets will have a larger orbit but still remain relatively stable, the researchers said. Jupiter and Saturn, however, become captured in a stable 5:2 resonance; for every five times Jupiter orbits the Sun, Saturn orbits twice and these expanded orbits as well as characteristics of the planetary resonance, makes the system more susceptible to perturbations by passing stars. 

After 30 billion years, such stellar perturbations jangle those stable orbits into chaotic ones, resulting in rapid planet loss. All but one planet escape their orbits, leaving into the galaxy as rogue planets, said the study.

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