A scientific detective story reveals the violent history of how the planets of the solar system were reshuffled
surprising that in the 17th and 18th centuries scientists likened the movements of the solar system to the ticking of well regulated machinery. The clockwork of orreries, mechanical models of the solar system, neatly encapsulated the apparently clockwork nature of the heavens, each planet following its designated course just as it always had, world without end.
In the mid-1990s, though, astronomers started to discover planets around other stars—and they were arranged very differently. The most easily detected were “hot Jupiters”, gas giants circling their stars in orbits much tighter than that of Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun, and thus far inside any conceivable snowline. Other systems featured giant planets in curious, elongated orbits inexplicable in terms of a coagulating disk.
But it was the weird exoplanets that started people thinking that the solar system might not be what it used to be. “Something big had happened in those systems, and that made it easier to think about the possibility that something like that might happen in our system,” says Bill Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The Nice model, as it became known, explained the outer planets’ final distances from the sun, the eccentricities of their orbits and their inclinations. The effects of the migrating giants on the planetesimals in the disk at the time also explained whys have the orbits they do, and why the orbits of the Trojan asteroids associated with Jupiter are highly inclined. “The Trojans, I think, were the smoking gun,” says Dr Bottke.
Some wondered, though, if the prodigal had stuck around, like a banished dog that stays in sight of the campfire. In 2016 Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, at the California Institute of Technology, proposed that the orbits of some very oddly behaveds might be explained by a ninth planet a bit smaller than Neptune that had been flung between 10 and 40 times farther from the sun. Dr Morbidelli is having none of it.
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