A substellar flyby that shaped the orbits of the giant planets
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The modestly eccentric and non-coplanar orbits of the giant planets pose a challenge to solar system formation theories which generally indicate that the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk in nearly perfectly circular and coplanar orbits. We demonstrate that a single encounter with a 2–50 Jupiter-mass object, passing through the solar system at a perihelion distance less than 20 AU and a hyperbolic excess velocity of 1–3 km/s, can excite the giant planets’ eccentricities and mutual inclinations to values comparable to those observed. We describe a metric to evaluate how closely a simulated flyby system matches the eccentricity and inclination secular modes of the solar system. We estimate that there is about a 1-in-9000 chance that such a flyby occurs during the solar system’s residence in its primordial cluster and produces a dynamical architecture similar to that of the solar system. The scenario of an ancient close encounter with a substellar object offers a plausible explanation for the origin of the moderate eccentricities and inclinations and the secular architecture of the planets. We discuss some broader implications of disruptive flyby encounters on planetary systems in the Galaxy.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it