Solar system instability simulation
This animation represents the results of a simulation designed and conducted by Beibei Liu of Zheijiang University, Sean Raymond of the University of Bordeaux and Seth Jacobson of Michigan State University. It shows how our solar system's gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — have spread out since the days of the early solar system. <br><br>The vertical gray line shows the inner edge of the protoplanetary disk, the cloud of dust and gas that gave birth to our solar system. The disk evaporated once the sun started burning and the inside-out dissipation of the cloud helps rearrange our gas giants (it even kicks a fifth gas giant out of our solar system in this iteration of the simulation).<br><br>For more information, read the trio's Nature paper at [LINK].