The Solar System has a second plane of alignment until now unknown and does not coincide with the ecliptic, the plane in which the planets align. The finding, made possible by studying the elongated orbits of long-period comets, shows that their aphelion, the orbital points furthest from the Sun, fall both close to the ecliptic and to the background, which scientists have called "Empty ecliptic", which has important implications for understanding how comets in the Solar System formed. The first plane of the Solar System is not aligned with the ecliptic, much less with the plane of the Milky Way, having an inclination of 60 ° with respect to the plane of the Galaxy, this is how the Solar System travels through space, it is inclined . Both the planets and most of the bodies in our system move approximately in the same orbital plane, the ecliptic. But there are exceptions, the most important of all being comets, especially those with longer periods, which can take up to tens of thousands of years to complete a single orbit around the Sun. These veritable "space wanderers", in fact , are not confined to the vicinity of the ecliptic, but instead come and go in and from various directions. Models of the formation of the Solar System, however, suggest that even comets with the longest orbital periods had to form near the ecliptic, although they later dispersed to their current orbits due to gravitational interactions, especially with large gaseous planets. like Jupiter or Saturn. So another set of external forces is needed to explain the distribution of cometary orbits that astronomers have been observing for decades. This external force must necessarily be the gravitational field of our galaxy itself, which exerts a small influence on our system, but not negligible at all.
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Source: Arika Higuchi, Japan University of Occupational and Environmental Health. / NAOJ Center for Computational Astrophysics / JPL, NASA.
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