A massive interstellar object has distorted the Solar System, and it could happen again in the future.

An interstellar object the size of a massive planet could have entered the Solar System billions of years ago, permanently altering the orbits of its four outer planets. Scientists believe that similar orbital changes may occur in the future. The research has been published on the arXiv preprint server, as reported by ScienceAlert.

It is known that the disk of the Solar System is relatively deformed, with the orbits of the planets slightly tilted and more elliptical than circular. Although the popular theory suggests that the orbits of the Solar System's planets should be in a single plane and circular, none of the eight planets, including Earth, have perfectly circular orbits, and they do not all lie in the same plane. The orbits of the outer planets of the Solar System—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—are particularly distinctive.

The new study proposes that a gigantic interstellar visitor might have entered the Solar System billions of years ago, distorted it, and then departed into the deeper cosmos. It is already known that interstellar visitors occasionally pass through the Solar System, with one of the most famous being ‘Oumuamua, discovered in 2017.

Scientists created thousands of models to determine what might have influenced the changes in the orbits of the largest planets in the Solar System. Some models indicated that an object with a mass 2 to 50 times greater than that of Jupiter could have entered inside Uranus's orbit and then moved closer to Mars, resulting in the deformation of the outer planets' orbits.

However, the models that best matched the current characteristics of the planets' orbits were those in which an object with a mass eight times that of Jupiter penetrated the Solar System. It flew at high speed from the edge of the Solar System to Mars before exiting into the deeper cosmos.

The models also show that there is a very low probability that a substellar object could have passed near the Sun at a close distance, which might have also caused changes in the orbits of the outer planets.

Since observations indicate that there are quite a number of substellar objects and giant planets in space, visits from such objects may be more common than close encounters with stars.

Scientists believe that in the future, a similar interstellar visitor could further deform the Solar System, potentially even more than it did billions of years ago.