Solar System likely to disintegrate sooner than earlier predictions: Study

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

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

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

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

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Impossible to make deterministic predictions

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

In 1999, astronomers predicted that 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 system.

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

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Stars ought to come close

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

After Sun completes its evolution into a white dwarf, outer planets will have a larger orbit but still remain relatively stable, researchers said. Jupiter and Saturn, however, become captured in a stable 5:2 resonance; for every five times Jupiter orbits Sun, Saturn orbits twice and se expanded orbits as well as characteristics of planetary resonance, makes 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 ir orbits, leaving into galaxy as rogue planets, said study.

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