Passing Stars And The Solar System's Future

Oktay74tn

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Passing Stars And The Solar System's Future
Oktay Yürük aka Oktay74tn, science and tech content
https://imgur.com/user/Oktay74tn

This animation shows the movement of 75000 stars close to the sun around the center of the Milky Way. With 2,000 simulations, astronomers have investigated the influence of field star passages on the stability of the solar system. Over the next 4.5 billion years, field star encounters will be the most likely cause of instability.

This is what the movement of the solar system would look like to an observer in the galactic disk. The small planets Mercury and Mars are the weak points. Field stars increase the instability of Mercury's orbit by 50 to 80 percent.

Passing stars change Pluto from a completely stable object over 5 billion years to one with a 5 percent instability probability.

The star Gliese 710, which is 62 light years away today, will come within 0.17 light years of the Sun in 1.29 million years.

The Influence of Passing Field Stars on the Solar System's Dynamical Future
Nathan A. Kaib, Sean N. Raymond
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04737

A Rogue Star Could Hurl Earth Into Deep Space, Study Warns
Passant Rabie
https://gizmodo.com/a-rogue-star-could-hurl-earth-into-deep-space-study-warns-2000608784

Wikipedia articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System#Future
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_710

nature_is_awesome

astronomy

universe

planets

pluto

drduffer

So my response was, “Wow!”
Then it was, “Well, it’s not next week!”

2 months ago |

A few numbers: Mass of the Milky Way = 200 billion m(Sun), galactic orbital velocity of the Sun = 255 km/s, galactic orbital period of the Sun = 225 Myrs, escape velocity of the Milky Way = 550 km/s, Wikipedia article about stellar kinematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_kinematics#High-velocity_stars .

JackieTreehornProductions

I thought the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy collision was going to be the big end event for everything but appears that may not happen now. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/milky-ways-chance-of-colliding-with-andromeda-galaxy-is-less-than-previously-thought-astronomers-report

Yes, there is a 50% chance that Andromeda and the Milky Way will miss each other. The Large Magellanic Cloud LMC makes the diference. This is a very interesting article and material for another video. :)

L1ttl3J1m

And the New Heavy Bombardment period to start about 10,000 years later, I guess.

YuffieK

Sol's gravity would still be over 100,000,000x stronger than Gliese 710's at a closest approach of .16 ly

A new Late Heavy bombardment? Probably, Ejecting Earth into an uninhabitable orbit? Highly unlikely.

RecurringNightmare

two interesting observations from that milky-way animation...apparently there are quite a lot of stars that arent rotating around the galactic centre but rather are kind of falling into it, ie the supermassive black hole there, which is a bit unexpected...and the "cloud" of observed stars that does rotate stretches out quite nicely, which is surprising as physicists had to "invent" dark matter specifically to explain why this actually is not happening, but apparently it actually is happening...

All stars orbit the galactic center. The other stars are stopped only in the animation to show the movements of the stars near to the Sun. Over time, the stars close to the sun will move away and other stars will approach the Sun. This is a nice diagram https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Near-stars-past-future-en.svg .

duh, im not talking about the frozen background image, i mean the stars that move directly up while the big cloud moves clockwise...those ones are either on super elliptic orbits, which is wild, or maybe they arent really part of the galaxy and just happened to fly into it and will be ejected again after slingshotting around the galactic centre...

This is the full movie https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbits_of_the_nearby_stars_around_the_galaxy_ESA445389.webm . The sun has a nearly cicular orbit oscillating up and down the galactic plane https://public.nrao.edu/ask/what-causes-the-suns-periodic-vertical-oscillation-through-the-plane-of-the-galaxy/ .

ah, nice, so some of those stars are actually predicted to become ejected eventually...fascinating...

SmackGawd

Poo poo go down the holeeeee

McTaco

That’s about 50 million years of travel.
Fun fact: our sun, and earth are 20 Galactic years old. We will turn 21 in about 185 million years

evildadunit

that'll be a party. I wonder who's coming

70,000 years ago, Scholz's star approached the Oort cloud. The binary of a red and a brown dwarf came as close as 0.82 light-years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz's_Star