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According to a new a study of Caltech’s planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin and by Gregory Laughlin, UC Santa Cruz professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Jupiter was a wrecking ball for the ancient Solar System, which was made up by a number of super-Earths.
The new research states that that the system used to contain planets which were bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.
“Our work suggests that Jupiter’s inward-outward migration could have destroyed a first generation of planets and set the stage for the formation of the mass-depleted terrestrial planets that our solar system has today,” said Batygin in a statement, adding that the discovery is filling some gaps in the understanding of the evolution of our solar system.
Researchers have been baffled by the low mass of the planets of in the Solar System. Most systems with a star of the dimension of our Sun have super-sized planets. This new theory explains how our planets, which are the remnants of bigger bodies, ended up to be so small.
Most planetary systems, which are different from ours, typically have one or more planets that are larger than Earth orbiting closer to their suns than Mercury does, our closest world.
In the Solar System, there’s nothing closer to the Sun than Mercury except a little debris from near-Earth asteroids and lots
A scenario that explains the formation of Jupiter and Saturn suggests that Jupiter was migrating towards the Sun, but the movement stopped when the formation of Saturn pushed back the plane. The two scientists completed a set of simulations to observe what would have occurred if a set of planets near the Sun had formed before Jupiter got there.
The researches say that some rocky worlds were forming close to the Sun, and their bodies were becoming super-Earths, gathering dense gas and dust, but as Jupiter headed in towards the Sun, gravitational forces from the huge planet would have swept these planets and other asteroids into overlapping orbits, which destroyed them.
The remnants from the collisions headed towards the Sun.and this would have destroyed all newly-formed super-Earths. Some debris would become the source material for a second generation of the current smaller worlds.
The Jupiter crashing effect through the system is how smaller planets, like Earth , Mercury, Venus and Mars, with their more thinner atmospheres were formed.
Image Source: Wallpaper Kid
