According to the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planets in our solar system are actually a second generation with the first generation of orbiting planets being destroyed.
It is said that the gas giant Jupiter before orbiting in its current state has invaded the early inner solar system and sweeped away all the planets orbiting in the inner solar system.
The scientist could possibly explain why our solar system is differently constituted when compared to other planetary system orbiting different stars.
Planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin at the California Institute of Technology said, “indeed, it appears that the solar system today is not the common representative of the galactic planetary census, instead we are something of an outlier.”
According to him in all the other planetary system there are planets which are very close to sun and if that is considered normal then our planetary system should also have planets which are closer to sun than Mercury.
In other planetary system there are few super earth rock like worlds which are about 10 times the size of the earth and they are orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury. They also posses’ gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn but they are very close to sun rather than far from the star like in our solar system.
This makes our solar system look odd, said the other astronomer.
The theory which is supporting our solar system being unique is the Grand Track theory.
According to this theory Jupiter after its formation got pulled towards the sun and caught up in the pull of interplanetary dust and went rampaging through inner solar system and when Saturn caught it in its own gravitational pull the rampage ended and they pulled each other to occupy their current positions.
Jupiter could have disrupted the orbits of the protoplanets, which led to a chain reaction of destructive collision. This debris could have destroyed planets caught up in Jupiter’s rampage.
“It’s the same thing we worry about if satellites were to be destroyed in low-Earth orbit,” says Laughlin, he further explained how this chain of reactions could cause the debris to crash into other satellites.
He finally concluded by saying “Our work indicates that Jupiter would have created just such a collisional cascade in the inner solar system.”