The instability of the giant planets “is related to a complete reshaping of the solar system, the formation of the cometary reservoirs, the sculpting of the asteroid belt,” said planetary scientist Alessandro Morbidelli of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, as per the report by Science News. “Understanding when it occurred means fixing a milestone in the history of the solar system.”

The theory of giant planet migration was first proposed by Morbidelli and colleagues in 2005. It is a widely accepted hypothesis for explaining much about the solar system.

Earlier, scientists believed that the instability occurred about 600 million years after the solar system started forming. 

However, Morbidelli thinks that the orbital instability came a lot earlier. 

His rationale is based on a rare type of meteorite called EL enstatite chondrites.

“The mix of elements in these meteorites suggests they must be the remnants of a large rocky body, a few hundred kilometers across, born near the terrestrial planets in the dusty disk that once swirled around our sun,” said the report.

According to a 2018 study, if the giant planets migrated later, a pair of asteroids dubbed Patroclus-Menoetius, trailing Jupiter around the sun while orbiting each other, would have been pulled apart. That 60 million  to 100 million year long duration makes the instability a prime suspect in the diversion of a hypothesized planet that hit Earth, creating the moon.

The timing “seems right”, said Matthew Clement, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, as per the Science News report. “Lots of things were happening in the solar system’s early history. However, dynamically speaking, we don’t have a whole lot of reason to believe that things changed much after the moon-forming impact.”

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Updated: 23 Oct 2023, 05:18 PM IST