Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 472, Issue 1, Pages L75-L79Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slx141
Keywords
methods: numerical; planets and satellites: dynamical evolution and stability; stars: kinematics and dynamics; open clusters and associations: general
Categories
Funding
- Royal Society
- ETH Research Grant [ETH-17 13-1]
- Swiss National Science Foundation
- SNSF
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The presence of an unseen 'Planet 9' on the outskirts of the Solar system has been invoked to explain the unexpected clustering of the orbits of several Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt Objects. We use N-body simulations to investigate the probability that Planet 9 was a free-floating planet (FFLOP) that was captured by the Sun in its birth star formation environment. We find that only 1-6 per cent of FFLOPs are ensnared by stars, even with the most optimal initial conditions for capture in star-forming regions (one FFLOP per star, and highly correlated stellar velocities to facilitate capture). Depending on the initial conditions of the star-forming regions, only 5-10 of 10 000 planets are captured on to orbits that lie within the constraints for Planet 9. When we apply an additional environmental constraint for Solar system formation - namely the injection of short-lived radioisotopes into the Sun's protoplanetary disc from supernovae - we find the probability for the capture of Planet 9 to be almost zero.
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