Could A Passing Star Propel Earth To The Solar System's Edge?
What if a passing star could expel Earth to the edge of the solar system? There's a small chance that a passing star could cause Earth to be flung outside of the solar system, crash into another planet, or get stolen by the travelling star.
What happens if a star flies close to our solar system?
According to New Scientist, other planets in our solar system could suffer a similar fate, with Mercury at risk of crashing into the Sun. Scientists at the University of Bordeaux in France, led by Sean Raymond, performed simulations to see what might happen if a passing star came close to the solar system.
The team ran 12,000 simulations and found that there's a 1% chance that a passing star could come within 100 astronomical units (AU) of our solar system in the next billion years. One AU represents the distance between Earth and the Sun (roughly 150 million kilometres).
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Garett Brown, a scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada who was not involved in the research told New Scientist that "over about a thousand years, we would see an object about as bright as Venus slowly moving across the sky until it became as bright as the full moon."
If something like this happened, researchers say that there's a 92% chance that all planets in our solar system would be fine. A star has to really wrestle with another star to steal a planet - so it's not something that happens easily.
Is Earth safe?
Researchers found that there's only a 0.28% chance that Earth would be flung outside the solar system to the Oort cloud, a region of icy objects beyond Pluto, if another star came close to our solar system.
The possibility of Earth crashing into another planet is twice as likely as Earth getting expelled out of the solar system. In case our planet made its way to the outside of the solar system, life on Earth doesn't have a good chance.
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A scenario in which Mercury crashes into the Sun is the most likely in this case (at a 2.54% chance) - with everything else mostly expected to stay fine. Regardless, the universe is filled with endless possibilities and scenarios so it's hard to ascertain what might or might not happen.
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