The Earth survives on the existence of another giant planet

A new study, published online on arxiv.org and published in the upcoming issue of The Astronomical Journal , provides an interesting insight into how a giant planet in the Solar System has helped the Earth. The land becomes a place of life.

That giant is Jupiter, a gas planet 318 times heavier than the Earth that uses its gravity to keep our planet from orbiting and also the largest planet in the Solar System.

The perfect balance that Jupiter has created with the gravitational force acting on the Earth has kept our planet in a stable orbit, which is essential for sustaining life - graphic images from the Observatory Sourthen European literature

Scientist Jonathan Horner from the University of South Queensland (Australia), who led this international research group, explained that Jupiter , with his great size, exerted a huge but just enough gravitational force of Earth to keep our planet spinning in a stable orbit. Without it, over time the Earth could drift to a location closer to the sun than Venus, becoming an overheating and dead planet.

Jupiter's gravity is just enough to not pull the earth towards it and submerge our planet during the last ice ages - which may not destroy Earth life, but at least will cause a few more extinct waves.

To reach this conclusion, the researchers created a simulation model of the Solar System. They moved Jupiter to different positions in the Solar System and as a result, in three-quarters of the experiment, a different position of this giant caused the Solar System to collapse within 10 million years.Jupiter is related not only to the stability of the Earth but also to some other planets . " The planets start to crash into each other and get pushed out of the solar system," Mr. Horner said.

These results also give astronomy - planetary scientists a different direction in the search for life outside the Solar System: if we want to find a copy of the Earth, we need to find the presence of gas giants like Jupiter. If in a distant planetary system, we find a rocky planet of the same type as Earth, in the habitable zone of the parent star and held steady by a gas giant like Jupiter, the planet That is very likely to be alive.