Our solar system is a pretty neat place. The orbits of the planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – tend to be circular and lie in the same plane , unlike the highly eccentric orbits of many exoplanets. With how far away the gas giants are from Earth (Saturn is about 1,300,000,000 kilometers away from Earth), everything would seem to indicate that they would not affect our planet too much.
We would be wrong in this statement, since even with such colossal distances between them, all the planets of the solar system are connected to each other and Saturn is really important for the Earth. What’s more, without Jupiter and Saturn orbiting beyond our blue world, life may not have been able to take hold on our planet , computer simulations run in the past to study how changing Earth’s orbits have suggested these two giant planets could affect the Earth.
Life on Earth would not have been possible without Saturn
It is not a trivial sentence. Saturn and Jupiter helped a lot to shape the solar system as we know it and if they did not exist, life on our planet would not have been possible in the beginning.
We owe it to Saturn to have the pleasant temperatures that we enjoy on Earth. If the ringed gas giant’s orbit had been slightly different, Earth’s orbit could also have been greatly elongated, like that of a long-period comet. The Earth’s orbit is so nearly circular that its distance from the sun only varies between 147 and 152 million kilometers (just 2%). The difference between the furthest point and the closest point is very small.
And it is that the gravity of all the planets interacts with each other and affects their orbits, especially with the largest ones, such as Saturn. Moving Saturn’s orbit 10% further, for example, would have disrupted this circular orbit by creating a resonance and causing our planet’s to stretch by tens of millions of miles, causing Earth to spend part of the year outside. of the habitable zone, just that region where temperatures are right for liquid water to form (also known as the Goldilocks zone) . Life may not have been able to withstand the changing temperature conditions for such a long period of time. And the first organisms would not have been able to survive.
And no, the Goldilocks area is not a very large area . If we were to move the Earth just 5% farther from the Sun, we would already be outside the habitable zone.
“At some point, the eccentricity of a planet affects its potential to support life, but it’s hard to say where that limit is. A planet with an orbit between the distance of the Earth from the sun and that of Mercury would be quite different from Earth, he says, but I don’t think it would prevent life from originating, “explained Rory Barnes of the University of Washington (USA). .).
Although the circularity of the orbits of each planet fluctuates over time, a very elongated orbit on a planet would allow even that planet to escape the gravity of the Sun. If Saturn suffered a 20-degree tilt of its orbit, it could end up expelling Mars Of the solar system. The Earth would need a slightly higher tilt: 30 degrees. But his fate would be the same.
A ‘shadow’ influence
These dominant forces representing Saturn and Jupiter delivered some of the water that now fills our oceans. In fact, it is possible that even Jupiter played a crucial role in the extinction of the dinosaurs related to the asteroid that, some 65 million years ago, impacted our planet in an event that marked the end of the age of the dinosaurs and the beginning of the reign of our mammalian ancestors. Without Jupiter, human beings might not exist.
It is incredible to think that such small changes in the solar system could have changed our world forever, and that we, today, would not be here. Our case is atypical.
Referencia: Pilat-Lohinger, E. (2015). The role of dynamics on the habitability of an Earth-like planet. International Journal of Astrobiology, 14(2), 145-152. doi:10.1017/S1473550414000469
Planet-disk interaction and orbital evolution. W. Kley, R.P. Nelson. Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics (2012) DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1203.1184
