An international team of astronomers has found a new network of superhighways to travel through our solar system much faster than previously possible. The scientists observed the dynamic structure of these paths that forms a series of connected arcs within what are known as space collectors that extend from the asteroid belt to Uranus and far beyond.
Space collectors
The newly discovered routes provide rapid transportation to the inner and outer reaches of the solar system: they can drive comets and asteroids close to Jupiter at the distance of Neptune in less than a decade and to 100 AU (astronomical units) in less than a century. This is excellent news, as we could use these superhighways to send spacecraft to the far reaches of our solar system and, for example, monitor near-Earth objects that could collide with our planet.
The researchers, comment in their study published in the journal Science Advances , that they identified a remarkable and unexpected ornamental structure in the solar system. This architecture was connected in a series of arcs that extended from the asteroid belt to beyond the planet Uranus. The strongest varieties or most striking arc structures were found linked to Jupiter with its deep gravitational control over small bodies in a wide and unknown range of three-body energies. They found orbits with collision or leak paths that led from Jupiter to Neptune in just a decade. The population of comets of the Jupiter family and small bodies such as centaurs are therefore controlled by these varieties on unprecedented timescales.
Thus, the newly discovered “celestial highway” acts over several decades, unlike the hundreds of thousands or millions of years that usually characterize the routes within the usual dynamics of the solar system.
Astronomers identified these arc structures by collecting numerical data on millions of orbits within our solar system and calculating how those orbits fit within known space varieties.
Where?
In this way, like a celestial highway, all planets appear to generate similar varieties of these cosmic superhighways throughout the solar system for rapid transportation everywhere.
“It should come as no surprise that Jupiter can induce large-scale transport on ten-decade time scales, as space missions have been specifically designed for Jupiter-assisted transport, with flybys of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes being cardinal examples. of this ”, comment the experts.
Mind you, the results will have to be further examined to determine how we could use it as with the spacecraft example or in monitoring the growing population of man-made artificial objects in the Earth-Moon system.
Referencia: Nataša Todorović et al. 2020. The arches of chaos in the Solar System. Science Advances 6 (48): eabd1313; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1313
