The findings, published Sept. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could change our understanding of what kinds of exoplanets orbit certain stars.
Until now, scientists thought the four outer planets would escape this phase relatively unscathed. A 1998 simulation-based study suggested that the gas the sun spews from its outer layers will push this planetary quartet outward, doubling the radius of each planet's orbit. Only the gravitational impact of a runaway star could destabilize this new order, and such events are thought to occur only once every billion billion years.
Each "blob" pushes the star backward, similar to how a fired bullet causes a gun to recoil. Although every push is small, moving the sun just a few feet per second, many pushes can, over time, impart the equivalent of an enormous kick that alters the sun's speed by several hundred feet per second. In fact, astronomers have already seen white dwarfs suffer such kicks in other star systems.
An illustration of the sun releasing a giant mass of plasma. As such large explosions increase in the sun's dying days, the recoil could disrupt the gravitational balance of the outer solar system. (Image credit: Chartchai Sansaneeyashewin via Getty Images)Chaos at the edge of town
To determine how the sun's mass loss would influence the giant planets, Batygin created computer-based simulations of the sun and the outer planets. The researchers considered three scenarios: if the sun lost its mass smoothly, if it spit out distinct mass blobs during its entire time evolving as a red giant, and if the sun spewed the blobs only during its last stages. The researchers also varied each ejected blob's mass.
Related storiesThe first scenario produced results similar to those of previous studies, with the outer solar system retaining almost all of its features for billions of years. In contrast, the other two cases had drastically different results. Using 672 simulations, the researchers found that if the sun lost mass in blobs, the giant planets would be thrown into chaos, switching places, developing weirdly oval-shaped orbits, and even getting ejected out of the solar system entirely. Most dramatically, in 96% of the simulations with the heaviest ejected mass packets, the planets get destroyed as they crashed into each other.
The study's findings hint that analogues of the present-day outer solar system around white dwarf stars are less likely to exist than previously thought. Kaib noted that the study's results suggest that planets with oval-shaped orbits should dominate instead. It's thought that habitable planets could exist around white dwarfs, but this study's findings show that our understanding of those distant star systems may be incomplete, and that such worlds may, in reality, be unstable.
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