LONDON: It turns out that Jupiter may be more than just an enormous ball of gas spinning a few hundred million miles farther out in the solar system.
We earthlings might have the giant planet to thank for our very existence.
Two scientists are suggesting that the inner solar system once played host to a bunch of “super-Earths” — planets that were larger than our own but smaller than Neptune.
Jupiter, however, put an end to those early occupiers of the inner orbits, bulldozing in and sweeping them into the sun, according to a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Jupiter’s epic, planet-shattering journey toward the sun and back out again laid the foundations for the creation of Earth and the other smaller planets nearby — Mercury, Venus and Mars.
“Our work suggests that Jupiter’s inward-outward migration could have destroyed a first generation of planets and set the stage for the formation of the mass-depleted terrestrial planets that our solar system has today,” said Konstantin Batygin of Caltech, one of the authors of the paper.
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