Passing Stars as an Important Driver of Paleoclimate and the Solar System's Orbital Evolution
The Astrophysical Journal Letters(2024)
摘要
Reconstructions of the paleoclimate indicate that ancient climatic
fluctuations on Earth are often correlated with variations in its orbital
elements. However, the chaos inherent in the solar system's orbital evolution
prevents numerical simulations from confidently predicting Earth's past orbital
evolution beyond 50-100 Myrs. Gravitational interactions among the Sun's
planets and asteroids are believed to set this limiting time horizon, but most
prior works approximate the solar system as an isolated system and neglect our
surrounding Galaxy. Here we present simulations that include the Sun's nearby
stellar population, and we find that close-passing field stars alter our entire
planetary system's orbital evolution via their gravitational perturbations on
the giant planets. This shortens the timespan over which Earth's orbital
evolution can be definitively known by a further 10
simulations that include an exceptionally close passage of the Sun-like star HD
7977 2.8 Myrs ago, new sequences of Earth's orbital evolution become possible
in epochs before 50 Myrs ago, which includes the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal
Maximum. Thus, simulations predicting Earth's past orbital evolution before 50
Myrs ago must consider the additional uncertainty from passing stars, which can
open new regimes of past orbital evolution not seen in previous modeling
efforts.
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关键词
Solar system terrestrial planets,Solar system evolution,Solar system planets,Planetary climates,Earth (planet),Stellar dynamics
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