Suffering an impact from a roving planet would cause the Earth to be completely destroyed. The fact that it only appears in the Solar System has also changed the orbits of all planets.
Unlike Earth or the planets orbiting the Sun, there are billions of planets roaming around the Milky Way galaxy and not tied to any host star.
Illustration of Earth colliding with a planet. (Photo: NASA/Newsweek).
However, one thing scientists are discussing is what happens when a rogue planet enters the Solar System, even approaching Earth. According to What If, a rogue planet has been discovered at the edge of the Solar System.
What is a wandering planet?
In contrast to planets orbiting the Solar System, a rogue planet is a planet that moves freely between stars and does not orbit a host star.
At birth, gravity can cause planets to collide with each other. The collision could cause the planet to deviate from its host star’s orbit, becoming a rogue planet.
In 2015, scientists in Canada published research stating that a gaseous planet existed in the Solar System more than 4 billion years ago, but there are indications that it was “kicked out” by Jupiter. out of orbit” after the collisions, according to Science Alert.
In addition, rogue planets also come from stars that cannot ignite, making them lone gaseous planets.
An illustration of the wandering planet in the star cluster Rho Ophiuchi. (Photo: Newsweek).
Scientists aren’t sure how many planets roam the Milky Way, as these planets are difficult to observe because they don’t emit much light. However, the number is estimated to be in the billions, Newsweek reported.
Unwanted scenario
In 2018, scientists discovered a rogue planet, just 20 light-years from Earth, 13 times larger than Jupiter – which is currently the largest planet in the Solar System (61.42). billion km2). Meanwhile, the Earth’s area is about 510 million square kilometers.
Scientists have posed a scenario of whether wandering planets will enter the Solar System, or even collide with Earth.
With an area thousands of times larger than Earth, a wandering planet can move at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second. A direct collision would cause the Earth to be completely destroyed.
However, scientists also say that the scale of the Solar System is quite large. In the absence of a collision, the rogue planet would also disturb the orbits of all planets in the Solar System. The planet’s gravity of more than 770 billion square kilometers will make the Solar System’s orbit even more elliptical.
The Earth will then orbit a narrow region of the Solar System.
Although humans can still live, orbiting close to the Sun makes summers very short and very hot, in addition to extremely cold, long winters.
More than 100 places are believed by scientists to exist wandering planets (red rings). Astronomers estimate that there are billions of wandering planets in the Milky Way galaxy. (Photo: Universal Science).
Earth may enter the next ice age. Instead of global warming, humanity will worry about “global cooling”.
However, besides hypothetical scenarios, scientists also mention the fact that there are many objects in space, and the chance of a roaming planet threatening to Earth is not high.
“I estimate that in the next 1,000 years, the chance that the rogue planet could reach Earth, rather than Mars or Venus, is one in two trillion times,” said Garrett Brown, an astrophysicist at the University of California. University of Toronto (Canada), said.
Michael Zemcov, an associate professor of physics at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said that the fact that the Solar System was able to remain stable for more than 4.5 billion years was a surprise, given the gravity and magnetic fields of the planets. like Jupiter was able to push other planets out of orbit, turning them into rogue planets.
