The greatest danger to Earth comes from a passing star disrupting our Oort cloud, and sending a potential planet-killer our way. Given that the planets and, indeed, the Kuiper belt appear not to be disrupted from what we presume our initial configuration was some 4.5 billion years ago, these numbers pass the smell test. with only a ~0.000001% chance, or 1-in-100,000,000, of a star actually colliding with the Earth.and a ~0.0001% chance, or around 1-in-a-million, of a star coming close enough to gravitationally disrupt the Earth,.a ~0.01% chance of a star coming close enough to disrupt Jupiter or Saturn,.a ~1% chance of a star coming close enough to disrupt our Kuiper belt,.In particular, over our entire Solar System’s history, there’s only been: away, or about ten times the distance from the Sun to Pluto. The closest we can expect another star to have come, over our entire planet’s existence, is about ~500 A.U. It’s unlikely, however, that any star ever came close enough to knock the other large bodies in our Solar System off course. Here’s what will happen when a black hole hits Earth, and what chances we have to do something about it. The odds of it may be unlikely at any moment in time, but astronomical timescales are very long and the Universe has many, many opportunities to create even extremely unlikely catastrophes. In the worst case scenario, you can even imagine a black hole striking the Earth. Other objects like black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, and rogue planets can do the same thing, knocking objects around like a cosmic game of billiards. Stars could pass through the Solar System, affecting the orbits of the planets. When that occurs, it typically perturbs some of the members of our Oort cloud, leading to a potential barrage of comets down the line.Īlthough that’s what most frequently occurs, worse outcomes can indeed ensue. Every stellar system out there is in motion relative to the Sun, and periodically - a few times every million years or so - one of those objects gets perilously close to our Solar System. Although the stars in the night sky seem fixed and unmoving, much like our Sun, they’re all engaged in the same gravitational dance that keeps us in orbit around the center of the Milky Way. Out there, somewhere in the Universe, our potential doom awaits us.
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