Cosmic Collapse
Have you ever indulged in the depths of your intrusive
thoughts and wondered how the universe is going to smash and chew up our little
planet over billions of years?
Well, that’s more or less what scientists Garett Brown and
Hanno Rein at the University of Toronto have done for their recent study on
what would happen if a neighboring star flew just a little too close to our
solar system.
While they're not expecting a neighboring star to come
cruising through the middle of our system, they looked at the potentially
devastating effects of minor shifts in the orbits of the solar system's
planets, triggered by a star getting a little too close to comfort — some
billions of miles away.
Solar Simulations
Brown and Rein ran nearly 3,000 simulations with varying
degrees of perturbation caused by a possible stellar fly-by, examining the
subsequent effects up to 4.8 billion years later.
"Up to," because some simulations ended early when
a planet was jettisoned from the solar system or was destroyed. Yikes!
The results are pretty shocking. The scientists found that
just a 0.1 percent change in Neptune’s distance to the Sun could plunge the
entire solar system into complete chaos — all because a star came within 23
billion miles of the Sun.
To put that number into perspective, Proxima Centauri, our
closest neighboring star, is about 24.8 trillion miles away.
Reining It In
While a complete collapse of the solar system sounds like a
pretty catastrophic event, that kind of demise could stretch out over billions
of years.
"These weak perturbations don’t destroy the solar
system immediately, they just wiggle it around a little bit, and over the next
millions or billions of years something goes unstable," Rein told NewScientist.
Perhaps a little more optimistically, 960 of the simulations
resulted in insignificant changes.
Besides, as the researchers themselves concluded, this kind
of stuff only happens in our corner of the universe once every 100 billion
years or so, with the effects taking millions of years to come into play.
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