Rogue star thought to disturb the outer Solar System
Scientists test the theory that a stellar object may have caused disruption to outer bodies billions of years ago
There's a raised possibility that a neighbouring star affected our Solar System, according to a set of simulations led by Susanne Pfalzner at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.
They were keen to discover why the outer Solar System has so many anomalies, such as Neptune being larger than Uranus despite being further out and the stretched orbits of small objects such as the dwarf planet Sedna. They worked on the idea that a passing star had disturbed these tiny icy worlds by casting them into interstellar space while causing others to have tilted paths around the Sun.
The simulations of a stellar flyby showed that the possibility of a star grazing past our system and disrupting planets was one in four. They concluded that the event is likely to have happened in our Solar System and that it would have been caused by a star of similar mass to our Sun passing at 80- to 100-times the distance between the Earth and Sun.
This would have happened during the early formation of our Solar System and it would also go some way to explaining why Planet X is likely to be tentimes the size of Earth, despite being so far from the Sun.