A “captured” alien planet may be hiding at the edge of the solar system

An international team of researchers created a model of the early solar system and concluded that a giant icy planet could be in the Oort cloud. Study this has not been peer-reviewed yet, but has already appeared in arXiv.

Approximately 4.5 billion years ago, when our system was just being formed, the planets did not have stable orbits and moved chaotically. For example, Jupiter was once much closer to the Sun than it is now. Gravity even scattered smaller bodies like billiard balls.

The researchers calculated that sometimes large pieces of "garbage" - even the size of a planet - flew so far that they were completely hidden from the gravitational effects of the giant planets. After that, they turned into space vagrants or fell under the influence of other planetary systems.

But something else is much more interesting. As it turned out, there is a possibility that our solar system has captured and is holding an icy gas giant from another system in the Oort cloud. This possibility is estimated at 7%. It is also possible that one of our planets, which is similar to Neptune, got stuck there in the early stages. The potential reality of this scenario is 0.5%.

However, given the size and distance from us of the Oort cloud, we may never know for sure what is hidden in it, astronomers say.

The Oort cloud is a hypothetical spherical region of the solar system with objects made of water, ammonia and methane ice. It is located at a distance of one light year from the Sun. Scientists note that its existence has not yet been proven, but there are indirect facts that confirm the possibility of such formation.