![]() If Kane made the planet’s mass smaller and put it directly in between Mars and Jupiter, he saw it was possible for the planet to remain stable for a long period of time. The super-Earth would change the shape of this Earth’s orbit, making it far less habitable than it is today, if not ending life entirely. It could also destabilize the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, tossing them into outer space as well. If a super-Earth in our solar system, a passing star, or any other celestial object disturbed Jupiter even slightly, all other planets would be profoundly affected.ĭepending on the mass and exact location of a super-Earth, its presence could ultimately eject Mercury and Venus as well as Earth from the solar system. Jupiter is much larger than all the other planets combined its mass is 318 times that of Earth, so its gravitational influence is profound. “Despite many astronomers having wished for this extra planet, it’s a good thing we don’t have it.”Īrtist’s concept of Kepler-62f, a super-Earth-size planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun, about 1,200 light-years from Earth. ![]() “This fictional planet gives a nudge to Jupiter that is just enough to destabilize everything else,” Kane said. The results, published in the Planetary Science Journal, were mostly disastrous for the solar system. To fill them in, Kane ran dynamic computer simulations of a planet between Mars and Jupiter with a range of different masses, and then observed the effects on the orbits of all other planets. These gaps could offer important insights into the architecture of our solar system, and into Earth’s evolution. It seems like wasted real estate,” he said. “Planetary scientists often wish there was something in between those two planets. The other gap is in location, relative to the sun, between Mars and Jupiter. “In other star systems, there are many planets with masses in that gap. ![]() Credit: NASA/Lunar and Planetary Institute The planets are not shown at the appropriate distance from the Sun. Pluto’s diameter is slightly less than one-fifth of Earth’s. Jupiter’s diameter is about 11 times that of the Earth’s and the Sun’s diameter is about 10 times Jupiter’s. Outward from the Sun, the planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, followed by the dwarf planet Pluto. This illustration shows the approximate sizes of the planets in our Solar System relative to each other. The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and the smallest gas giant is Neptune, which is four times wider and 17 times more massive than Earth. The first is the gap in our solar system between the size of terrestrial and giant gas planets. UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane explained that his experiment was meant to address two notable gaps in planetary science. Credit: NASA/JPL/ASU Experiment demonstrates our solar system’s fragility.Ī terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a University of California, Riverside (UCR) experiment. Most of the planetary images in this montage were obtained by NASA’s planetary missions, which have dramatically changed our understanding of the solar system in the past 30 years. The light emitted from the Rosette Nebula results from the presence of hydrogen (red), oxygen (green), and sulfur (blue). This solar system montage of the nine planets and four large moons of Jupiter in our solar system are set against a false-color view of the Rosette Nebula.
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