The solar system’s gravitational frontier extends to nearly 3.8 light-years from the sun<\/a>, they contend, roughly 241,000 astronomical units (AU), a distance that brings the “edge” of the solar system<\/a> to within the same scale as the separation between neighboring stars. The edge of our solar system may be defined not by a sharp boundary, but by a “complex dance among forces, energies and trajectories,” they write. Green and Belbruno recently made their case in the August 2026 issue<\/a> of the magazine ROOM – the Space Journal of Asgardia.<\/p>\n Slow moving objects<\/p>\n Moreover, this theory claims that the gravitationally stable Solar Lagrange points L1 and L2<\/a> could form a type of “portal” that could funnel future interstellar visitors such as the recent comet 3I\/ATLAS<\/a> into the solar system, perhaps allowing scientists to capture them for future study.<\/p>\n “Discovering the solar-galactic center L1 location is important since slow moving objects that enter this region can be captured by our sun and become part of our solar system,” Green told Space.com. “Who knows if there may be a large captured rogue planet on its way into the solar system right now,” he said.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Green said there’s a need to look at these newly calculated L1 and L2 locations to see what could be found. He is now in discussion about making such observations with the New Horizons spacecraft<\/a> team that explored Pluto<\/a> in 2015 and is now operating in the outer heliosphere.<\/p>\n “Even accumulated dust in this region could verify many of the calculations we have made including the extent of the dark matter in our galaxy,” said Green.<\/p>\n \n A diagram showing the Lagrange points L1 though L5. (Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)Ballistic capture<\/p>\n “It’s a really nice and significant result,” Belbruno told Space.com. The ROOM article, written for a popular audience, draws from his August 2025 keynote lecture at the Niels Bohr Institute. Much of the theory also stems from Belbruno’s work on permanent capture into the solar system and weak stability boundaries published in 2024 in the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy.<\/p>\n Belbruno authored the book Fly Me to the Moon: An Insider’s Guide to the New Science of Space Travel<\/a> (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007). In that work, he spells out how to harness low-fuel space travel he likens to “surfing the gravitational field.”<\/p>\n “This new work represents a new application of weak stability boundary theory, first applied in 1987 to find new routes to Earth’s moon, using ballistic capture for spacecraft,” Belbruno said. “Now, its application is substantially extended to ballistic capture into our solar system from interstellar space and in estimating the size of our solar system,” he said.<\/p>\n What to read next<\/p>\n Green and Belbruno point out that the very recent discovery of interstellar objects \u200a\u2014 such as interstellar comet 3I\/ATLAS<\/a> in 2025 \u200a\u2014 passing through our solar system on hyperbolic trajectories “has opened an entirely new window onto the material and processes shaping planetary systems across the galaxy.”<\/p>\n \n![\"Space\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net\/flexiimages\/dpnbewsyjn1783958986.svg\")
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