Jupiter's 'Smashing' Migration May Explain Our Oddball Solar System
Source: Space.com
Jupiter's 'Smashing' Migration May Explain Our Oddball Solar System
by Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor | March 23, 2015 03:01pm ET
Jupiter may have acted like a giant wrecking ball in the newborn solar system, roaming in to destroy an early generation of inner planets before retreating to its current orbit, researchers say.
This Jupiter finding could help explain why the solar system is so different from the hundreds of other planetary systems that astronomers have recently discovered, and that life as it is known on Earth might be rarer than previously thought, the scientists added.
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"Our solar system is looking increasingly like an oddball," study co-author Gregory Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement.
Now Batygin and Laughlin find that Jupiter's migrations toward and away from the sun might explain why the solar system is an anomaly.
Wandering Jupiter
The researchers modeled a leading scenario for the formation of Jupiter and Saturn known as the "Grand Tack," wherein Jupiter arose first and migrated toward the sun until Saturn formed, which caused Jupiter to reverse course and migrate outward to its current orbit. They calculated what might happen if a set of rocky planets formed in the inner solar system before Jupiter migrated inward.
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Read more: http://www.space.com/28901-wandering-jupiter-oddball-solar-system.html
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