Our solar system was home to enormous SUPER EARTHS, scientists claim

LONG before Mercury, Venus and Earth formed, our solar system was home to a number of SUPER EARTHS, scientists have sensationally claimed.

superearthCaltech

A number of superearths were in existence in the early years of the solar system

The planets, that were larger than Earth, were the first generation and were in existence during the first few million years of our solar system's lifetime.

It may have even been possible for life to be present on some of these planets, much like our own Earth today.

However the Super Earths were destroyed as our solar system's largest planet Jupiter grew in size.

Scientists claim that during the first few million years of its lifetime, when planetary bodies were still embedded in a disk of gas and dust around a relatively young Sun, Jupiter became so massive and gravitationally influential that it was able to clear a gap in the disk of gas.

As the Sun pulled the disk's gas in toward itself, Jupiter also began drifting inward, as though carried on a giant conveyor belt along with the other planets.

Caltech planetary scientist, Konstantin Batygin said: "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.

solar-systemCaltech

A new simulation depicts a time early in the solar system's history when Jupiter controlled all

"All of this fits beautifully with other recent developments in understanding how the solar system evolved, while filling in some gaps."

The findings, made by Konstantin Batygin and Gregory Laughlin of UC Santa Cruz, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show a new picture of the early solar system that help to answer a number of outstanding questions.

Mr Batygin explains: "Jupiter would have continued on that belt, eventually being dumped onto the Sun if not for Saturn."

Saturn was formed after Jupiter but got pulled toward the Sun at a faster rate, allowing it to catch up. Once the two massive planets got close enough, they locked into a special kind of relationship called an orbital resonance.

"That resonance allowed the two planets to open up a mutual gap in the disk, and they started playing this game where they traded angular momentum and energy with one another, almost to a beat," says Mr Batygin.

Eventually, that back and forth would have caused all of the gas between the two worlds to be pushed out, a situation that would have reversed the planets' migration direction and sent them back outward in the solar system.

Mr Batygin and Mr Laughlin's calculations and simulations show that as Jupiter moved inward, it pulled all the planets it encountered along the way into orbital resonances and carried them toward the Sun.

But as those planets got closer to the Sun, their orbits also became elliptical. "You cannot reduce the size of your orbit without paying a price, and that turns out to be increased ellipticity," explains Batygin.

Those new, more elongated orbits caused the planets to sweep through previously unpenetrated regions of the disk, setting off a cascade of collisions among the debris.

In fact, Mr Batygin's calculations show that during this period, every planet would have collided with another object at least once every 200 years, violently breaking them apart and sending them decaying into the Sun at an increased rate.

The researchers did one final simulation to see what would happen to a population of super-Earths in the inner solar system if they were around when this cascade of collisions started.

They ran the simulation on a well-known extrasolar system known as Kepler-11, which features six super-Earths with a combined mass 40 times that of Earth, orbiting a Sun-like star.

The scientists found the super-Earths would be shepherded into the Sun by a decaying avalanche of debris over a period of 20,000 years.

"It's a very effective physical process," said Mr Batygin. "You only need a few Earth masses worth of material to drive tens of Earth masses worth of planets into the Sun."

Only about 10 percent of the material Jupiter swept up would need to be left behind to account for the mass that now makes up Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

Planets Song

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