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Scientists have used a Nasa supercomputer to work out what our solar system would look like to alien astronomers searching for other planets. New simulations have tracked the interactions of thousands of dust grains to how this view might have changed as our planetary system matured.
And astronomers hope that the new view could help them learn how to spot planets orbiting distant stars. The dust originates in the Kuiper Belt, a cold-storage zone beyond Neptune where millions of icy bodies - including Pluto - orbit the Sun.
Kuiper Belt objects occasionally crash into each other, and this relentless bump-and-grind produces a flurry of icy grains. But tracking how this dust travels through the solar system is not easy because small particles are subject to a variety of forces in addition to the gravitational pull of the sun and planets.
The grains are affected by the solar wind, which works to bring dust closer to the sun, and sunlight, which can either pull dust inward or push it outward. Exactly what happens depends on the size of the grain.
‘Our new simulations also allow us to see how dust from the Kuiper Belt might have looked when the solar system was much younger,' said Christopher Stark, Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.
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