Konstantin Batygin

New simulations suggest that the orbits of the solar system's planets, including Earth, will destabilize as the Sun expands into a red giant.

The computations by Konstantin Batygin and colleagues from the California Institute of Technology are based on numerical experiments designed to analyze the orbital dynamics of the outer solar system under different solar mass loss scenarios.

And they show how our solar system's planets will undergo massive gravitational perturbations and planetary resonances, causing their orbits to destabilize as the Sun expands.

And depending on how much of the Sun's mass is ejected during the red giant phase, it means our solar system will be disassembled on a far more rapid timescale than previously thought.

That is how the scientific community viewed the outer planets.

But if you look at the incredibly detailed calculations from theoretical astrophysicists, Konstantin Batygin, Jim Fuller and Fred Adams, they have radically rewritten both the timeline and the actual mechanical nature of this demise.

And their findings completely upend that whole grandfather clock idea.

It really does.

It does.

Back in episode 195, we covered Batygin's work on how our own solar system could be destabilized far in the future.

This is the same physics running at the start of a system's life instead of the end.

Turrini's phrase for the link between star and planets is genetic one.

This orbital overlap is important because we know that the inner solar system can easily become chaotic.

For example, Batygin and Laughlin showed in 2008 that instabilities are plausible on a timescale of just 1 billion years from now.

And now, in this asteroid deflection scheme, we're

really stirring the pot by pushing planets around into unnatural positions.

The white dwarf is still around 35,000 degrees, so it's stripping that planet's atmosphere, and the niobium-rich gas is raining back down onto the star where Hubble saw it.

If that sounds familiar, it's the flip side of a story we ran last month, Batygin and colleagues arguing that when a star like the Sun becomes a white dwarf, its planets get scattered.

This suggests a star's death can also build something new.

Three caveats, and the team states them itself.

And what's crazy is that astronomers are really hunting for a hidden planet out in space.

So in 2016, two astronomers from Caltech, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, they announced that something strange might actually be hiding on the edge of our solar system that we haven't really discovered yet.

They had been studying a handful of distant objects past Neptune, and they noticed something really weird.

Their orbits seemed to be clustering together.