“The planets may be too faint to be detected directly, but hypothetical aliens who could study the solar system couldeasily determine the presence of Neptuneas its gravity marks a small gap in the dust, “explains Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who led the study.” We hope that our models will help us locate Neptune-sized worlds around other stars. “he added.
The dust in question originates from theKuiper Belt, a cold storage zone, beyond Neptune, where millions of icy bodies – including Pluto – orbit the Sun. Scientists believe the region is an earlier, thinner version of the debris disks seen around it. stars like Vega and Fomalhaut. “Our new simulations also allow us to see what the Kuiper Belt dust might have looked like when the solar system was much younger,” says Christopher Stark, a co-author of the research.
Objects in the Belt sometimes collide with each other, producing a barrage of ice grains. But tracking how dust travels through the solar system is not easy because small particles are subject to a variety of forces in addition to the gravitational pull of the sun and planets, NASA has reported. “It was thought that the collision calculation could not be done because there are too many of these little grains to track,” Kuchner said. “But we’ve found a way to do it, and a whole new landscape has opened up.”
With the help ofsupercomputerDiscoverfrom NASA, the researchers maintained tabs of 75,000 dust particles as they interacted with the outer planets, sunlight, the solar wind, and each other. The size of the model dust ranged from the width of the eye of a needle (1.2 millimeters) to more than a thousand times smaller, similar in size to the particles in smoke. During the simulation, the grains were placed in one of three types of orbits found in today’s Kuiper Belt at a rate based on current ideas of how fast that dust is produced. From the data obtained, the researchers createdsynthesis images of the solar system’s infrared emissions seen from afar.
Using separate models, the team produced images that roughly correspond to 10, 100 and 1,000 times more intense dust generation than the original model. The resulting increase in dust reflects the conditions of what the Kuiper Belt looked like 700 million, 100 million and 15 million years ago. “We are in awe of what we have seen,” confesses Kuchner. With increasingly severe collisions, the probability that large dust grains will survive drifting out of the Kuiper Belt drops sharply.Going back in time, today’s dust disk collapses into a dense, bright ring more like the rings seen around other stars., especially Fomalhaut.
