{"id":584738,"date":"2026-08-30T07:56:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T07:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/584738\/"},"modified":"2026-08-30T07:56:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T07:56:13","slug":"how-many-neighbours-did-planet-earth-lose-we-may-have-lost-planet-9-and-trillions-of-comets-from-our-solar-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/584738\/","title":{"rendered":"How many neighbours did planet Earth lose? We may have lost planet 9 and trillions of comets from our Solar System"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Solar System didn’t always exist as we know it today.<\/p>\n

It’s about 4.5 billion years old<\/a> and took quite a long time to settle down into the relatively stable system of planets and other bodies orbiting the Sun that we see now.<\/p>\n

Our best model of how the Solar System arrived at its current arrangement of planets proposes that we lost at least one and possibly two Neptune-sized planets along the way, as Jupiter and Saturn shuffled and jostled for position.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those ice giants are now long gone, but the evidence remains of a period of great instability early in the history of the Solar System.<\/p>\n

\"AA computer model of the Kuiper Belt. Credit: NASA<\/p>\n

The trillions of icy objects of the Kuiper Belt<\/a>, the Scattered Disc (a ring of icy bodies that can reach high inclinations above the ecliptic plane) and the faraway Oort cloud<\/a> were all tossed away from the Sun via gravitational interactions with the giant planets, but not quite far enough away to escape the Sun\u2019s grasp.<\/p>\n

The hypothetical Planet Nine<\/a> could also have been ejected into the Solar System\u2019s hinterlands during this time.<\/p>\n

Much more material was probably lost forever. Who knows how many smaller planets were banished?<\/p>\n

And undoubtedly, there are trillions more comets that formed alongside Earth which are now paying other planetary systems a visit, like the interstellar comets we witness passing through our own Solar System.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Solar System didn’t always exist as we know it today. It’s about 4.5 billion years old and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-584738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}