Next time you want to complain about the weather, you could remember that it’s far more unpleasant on all of the other Solar System’s planets. Leaving aside a few minor exceptions, things are overall pretty fine and dandy when it comes to Earth’s position in its Solar System. Being located 150 million km away from the Sun and in the “Goldilocks Zone,” it means that we get just about the right temperatures.
But you know what they say that nothing lasts forever. Even our beloved Sun, which currently maintains all life forms on Earth, will show its dark side at some point in the far future. Assuming that a nuclear war, an asteroid, a pandemic, or commercials won’t kill all humans in the next 5 billion years from now, the Sun will expand its volume enough to cause a true ‘Hell on Earth’ scenario. Therefore, it would be useful to start thinking even now about how we could move to another Solar System. In the process, why not take the planet itself with us as well? But is it even possible?
Highly unlikely, but not impossible
Matteo Ceriotti from the University of Glasgow, where he serves as both an aerospace engineer and as a space systems engineering lecturer, suggests for LiveScience.com that the wild scenario might be possible, although it’s very unlikely.
Ceriotti explained as the publication mentioned quotes:
The Earth could be moved away from its orbit through the action of a massive interstellar object, flying through interstellar space and coming into the solar system and passing close to the Earth,
In this close encounter, known as a ‘flyby,’ the Earth and the object would exchange energy and momentum, and the Earth’s orbit would be disrupted. If the object were fast, massive and close enough, it could project the Earth into an escape orbit directed outside of the solar system.
Surely the idea can just be implemented into a successful sci-fi movie for now, but who knows, maybe it could be feasible in the next centuries or maybe even decades. God knows when such an interstellar object would pass by, but Ceriotti believes that it’s at least theoretically possible.
