RE: Oh no! Another alien probe
December 15, 2017 at 12:03 pm
(This post was last modified: December 15, 2017 at 12:06 pm by Anomalocaris.)
True enough. But the steady leakage of distant Oort comets may dominate mass loss from solar system today, but that may not always have been the case.
Jupiter accounts for over half of all the mass that orbits the sun, as well as over two thirds of the all the total angular momentum there is in the entire solar system, the sun included. Gravitational sling shot with Jupiter is capable of ejecting objects out of the solar system by itself. Several Nasa spacecraft takes advantage of this to boost themselves into escape trajectories from solar system.
Today Jupiter does not account for significant number of ejections from solar system because the Jupiter has already largely cleared out the band around its own orbit, so there is nothing for Jupiter to eject.
However, during the first 500 million years of solar system's life, both Jupiter and Saturn's orbits were unstable under each other's gravitational influence. Jupiter and SatuBo's orbits migrated quite a bit. During this period, the inner solar system still had a lot more small objects remaining from the initial accretion of planets. Any comets in the inner solar system would over several million years have their volatile booked off and leave behind an cinder that would be indistinguishableb from an asteroid, just like our object. In the early solar system, As Jupiter and Saturn's orbits migrated , they would sweep broad swath of the inner solar system clean of these objects. A sizeable portion of those swept by Jupiter would have been sling shot out of the solar system by Jupiter's gravity.
Brcause total mass and density of objects in the inner solar system during early part of solar system history was likely much higher than in the oort cloud today, the total number of baked inner solar system objects slung shot by Jupiter out of the solar system during the period of orbit migration in the first 500million years of solar system history may well account for a sizeable fraction of all the objects ever dispersed by the solar system into interstellar space.
Jupiter accounts for over half of all the mass that orbits the sun, as well as over two thirds of the all the total angular momentum there is in the entire solar system, the sun included. Gravitational sling shot with Jupiter is capable of ejecting objects out of the solar system by itself. Several Nasa spacecraft takes advantage of this to boost themselves into escape trajectories from solar system.
Today Jupiter does not account for significant number of ejections from solar system because the Jupiter has already largely cleared out the band around its own orbit, so there is nothing for Jupiter to eject.
However, during the first 500 million years of solar system's life, both Jupiter and Saturn's orbits were unstable under each other's gravitational influence. Jupiter and SatuBo's orbits migrated quite a bit. During this period, the inner solar system still had a lot more small objects remaining from the initial accretion of planets. Any comets in the inner solar system would over several million years have their volatile booked off and leave behind an cinder that would be indistinguishableb from an asteroid, just like our object. In the early solar system, As Jupiter and Saturn's orbits migrated , they would sweep broad swath of the inner solar system clean of these objects. A sizeable portion of those swept by Jupiter would have been sling shot out of the solar system by Jupiter's gravity.
Brcause total mass and density of objects in the inner solar system during early part of solar system history was likely much higher than in the oort cloud today, the total number of baked inner solar system objects slung shot by Jupiter out of the solar system during the period of orbit migration in the first 500million years of solar system history may well account for a sizeable fraction of all the objects ever dispersed by the solar system into interstellar space.
