Planetary Migration - in The Solar System

In The Solar System

The migration of the outer planets is necessary to account for the existence and properties of the Solar System's outermost regions. Beyond Neptune, the Solar System continues into the Kuiper belt, the scattered disc, and the Oort cloud, three sparse populations of small icy bodies thought to be the points of origin for most observed comets. At their distance from the Sun, accretion was too slow to allow planets to form before the solar nebula dispersed, and thus the initial disc lacked enough mass density to consolidate into a planet. The Kuiper belt lies between 30 and 55 AU from the Sun, while the farther scattered disc extends to over 100 AU, and the distant Oort cloud begins at about 50,000 AU.

Originally, however, the Kuiper belt was much denser and closer to the Sun: it contained millions of planetesimals, and had an outer edge at approximately 30 AU, the present distance of Neptune.

After the formation of the Solar System, the orbits of all the giant planets continued to change slowly, influenced by their interaction with the large number of remaining planetesimals. After 500–600 million years (about 4 billion years ago) Jupiter and Saturn fell into a 2:1 orbital resonance; Saturn orbited the Sun once for every two Jupiter orbits. This resonance created a gravitational push against the outer planets, causing Neptune to surge past Uranus and plough into the dense planetesimal belt. The planets scattered the majority of the small icy bodies inwards, while themselves moving outwards. These planetesimals then scattered off the next planet they encountered in a similar manner, moving the planets' orbits outwards while they moved inwards. This process continued until the planetesimals interacted with Jupiter, whose immense gravity sent them into highly elliptical orbits or even ejected them outright from the Solar System. This caused Jupiter to move slightly inward. This scattering scenario explains the trans-Neptunian populations' present low mass.

The outer two planets of the Solar System, Uranus and Neptune, are believed to have migrated outward in this way from their formation in orbits near Jupiter and Saturn to their current positions, over hundreds of millions of years. Eventually, friction within the planetesimal disc made the orbits of Uranus and Neptune circular again.

In contrast to the outer planets, the inner planets are not believed to have migrated significantly over the age of the Solar System, because their orbits have remained stable following the period of giant impacts.