THE ELIMINATOR

A close encounter with the biggest planet of our solar system i.e. Jupiter,may have led to ejection of the fifth gas giant.

A gas giant

The existence of a fifth giant planet at the time of the Solar System’s formation of Solar System– in addition to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – was.

But if it did exist, how did it get pushed out? For years, astronomers have suspected the ouster was either Jupiter or Saturn.

“Our evidence points to Jupiter,” said team member Ryan Cloutier, of the University of Toronto.

But, earlier studies which proposed that gas giants could possibly eject one another did not consider the effect such violent encounters would have on minor bodies, such as the known moons of the giant planets, and their orbits.

So the team of astronomers tuned their attention on moons and orbits,making computer animations based on modern day trajectories of Callisto and Galileo ,  the regular moons orbiting around Jupiter and Saturn respectively.

The team  measured the likelihood of each one producing its current orbit in the event that its host planet was responsible for ejecting the hypothetical ice giant planet, an incident which would have caused significant disturbance to each moon’s original orbit.

“ We compute the likelihood of reconciling a regular Jovian satellite orbit with the current orbit of Callisto following an ice giant ejection by Jupiter of 42 percent and conclude that such a large likelihood supports the hypothesis of a fifth giant planet’s existence,” Cloutier and co-authors wrote in their paper in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint).

“A similar calculation for Iapetus reveals that it is much more difficult for Saturn to have ejected an ice giant and reconcile a Romanian satellite orbit with that of Iapetus (likelihood around 1 percent), although uncertainties regarding the formation of Iapetus, on its unusual orbit, complicates the interpretation of this result.”

Reposted by: Aviral Srivastava 

find me on

Instagram: avirals_22

email: aviralsrivastava12@gmail.com