In Liu Cixin’s short story “The Wandering Earth” (first published in the Chinese journal Science Fiction World in July 2000), the author writes that planetary leaders have driven the Earth out of the solar system to escape an imminent solar flare that is expected to destroy all terrestrial planets. depicts a scenario that they decide to pull out. Of course, this story falls in the fictional group, but whether it’s possible for Earth to actually leave the Solar system is also worthy of attention as a real science question.
“It’s very unlikely,” Matteo Ceriotti, an aeronautical engineer and aerospace systems engineering lecturer at the University of Glasgow in England, told Live Science in an email.
However, as Ceriotti explains, the definition of “unlikely” does not mean that it is “impossible.” Ceriotti also proposes a way that could be done theoretically.
“Earth may be moved away from its orbit by the action of a massive interstellar body flying through interstellar space and entering the solar system and passing close to Earth,” says Ceriotti. “In this close encounter, known as a close pass, the Earth and object will exchange energy and momentum, and the Earth will ‘s orbit will be disrupted. If the object is fast, large, and close enough, it could slip Earth into a directed escape orbit outside the solar system.”
Timothy Davis, a senior lecturer in physics and astronomy at Cardiff University in England, also offers his own hypothesis on the subject, accepting that the Earth could theoretically be removed from the solar system.
“The planets are in stable orbits around the Sun as they exist now,” Davis told Live Science. However, if the Sun were to experience a close encounter with another star, then the gravitational interactions of these objects could disrupt those orbits, potentially causing Earth to “It can leave the solar system,” he said. But Davis notes that while this scenario is possible, it’s incredibly doubtful that it will happen, at least in the foreseeable future.
“Such stellar encounters are extremely rare,” Davis says. “We know that the star Gliese 710, for example, is expected to come very close to the Sun astronomically in about a million years, but even this close transit is unlikely to disturb the planets.”
Can humanity get the Earth out of its orbit?
While it’s unlikely that external forces will force the Earth out of the solar system anytime soon, it seems like another possibility that humanity will build machines that can alter the planet’s orbit enough to force it out of the solar system. However, Davis states that the energy required to get the Earth out of the solar system is incredibly high, and that this is highly unlikely.
However, if the Earth’s orbit of the Sun somehow occurs, it is predicted that there will be very serious changes to the Earth’s surface globally, including the loss of our atmosphere. The Earth’s climate is almost entirely dependent on the radiation coming from the Sun, and as this distance increases, the amount of incoming radiation will decrease, while the amount of heat will decrease. This means that life on Earth is almost completely destroyed. Davis says some life forms will be able to survive at least for a while despite the decreasing atmosphere and temperature, but he states that complex life forms will almost certainly disappear completely at temperatures predicted to reach minus 230 degrees Celsius.
According to Ceriotti, it is estimated that in about 4.5 billion years, our galaxy will collide with its closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. It is certain that this huge collision, which will involve millions of stars, will cause disruptions in the solar system. However, as Ceriotti points out, the Sun is expected to grow to encompass the Earth in approximately the next 5 billion years.
So, while it’s predicted that Earth will somehow leave the solar system someday, it doesn’t look like we’ll have to deal with this problem for at least a few billion more years.
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