Space & Astronomy

A huge planet-like object may have once barged through our solar system

By T.K. Randall
January 20, 2025 ·  9 comments

Were we once visited by an interstellar giant ? Image Credit: NASA / Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) The orbits of some of the planets in our solar system are now thought to have been influenced by a visitor from deep space - an object so large that it nudged these worlds' orbits as it passed through.

This is the idea put forward by scientists as part of a new study into unexplained discrepancies in the orbits of the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

By running thousands of computer simulations, the researchers discovered that a visiting interstellar body - most likely eight times the mass of Jupiter - could account for the current orbits of the gas giants as we see them today.This huge visitor would have likely passed as close as 1.6 AU from the Sun (a little further than the current orbit of Mars) before leaving the solar system and disappearing back off into deep space.

Exactly when this would have occurred remains unclear, but it is thought that in order to change the orbits of the gas giants, such a close encounter would have only needed to happen once.

Given that there could be any number of such objects careening through the cosmos, it is certainly possible that our solar system could have been visited by one at some point in the distant past.

Whether we will ever be able to identify the exact object responsible, however, seems unlikely.

Source: Live Science | Comments (9)

Tags: Planet, Solar System