If it were not for the influence of Jupiter, another large planet could appear between it and Mars. Perhaps it would be a super-Earth, a world sorely lacking in the solar system. However, simulations showed that its appearance would threaten to destabilize the orbits of most of the neighboring planets, and Earth would be thrown far away from the Sun.
Today, with many planetary systems discovered in deep space, our solar system seems particularly unusual. It contains a group of compact, rocky planets, such as Mars or Venus, and gas giants like icy Neptune, ringed Saturn, and others. But planets of intermediate classes - super-Earths and mini-Neptunes - widely distributed in other stars are conspicuously absent from this picture.
Such worlds are several times larger than Earth and are considered particularly interesting, including in terms of potential habitability. It would seem that there is also a suitable place for such a planet - the vast void between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Now there is only the main asteroid belt, the remains of a planet that never managed to form.
A simulation by astronomers at the University of California, Riverside, showed what would happen to the solar system if another planet of the super-Earth class existed between Jupiter and Mars. As it turns out, we're very lucky it's not there. An article about this was published in The Planetary Science Journal.
Stephen Kane (Stephen Kane) and his colleagues found that such a planet can remain stable only while in an orbit strictly equal to three astronomical units - the average orbital radius of Earth. Mars is just under 1.5 astronomical units from the Sun, Jupiter is 5.2 astronomical units. A super-Earth located almost anywhere else in this interval would prove devastating to the entire solar system.
Scientists have shown that if a massive planet rotated between 3.1 and 4.0 astronomical units, it would destabilize the orbit of Mercury, and between 2.0 and 2.7 astronomical units it would also destabilize Mars. Massive Saturn and Jupiter would be little affected, but the Uranus and Neptune behind them would also "come off" their orbits and eventually be thrown out of the solar system. Worse, the same fate would await the planets of the inner regions, from Mercury to Mars, including Earth.
Such a picture makes one look at the giant Jupiter with even greater respect. We already know what an important role this planet plays in the history of life on Earth. Thanks to its powerful gravity, Jupiter intercepts most comets and asteroids, protecting the inner solar system from too much bombardment. But its influence on us doesn't seem to stop there.
It is believed that it was the gravity of the enormous Jupiter that destabilized the processes occurring in the orbit between it and Mars. It absorbed the lion's share of the matter there and prevented the emergence of another planet, which, as it turned out, could have caused real chaos in the entire solar system. As a result, there was very little matter left in the asteroid belt (a hundredth of a percent of Earth's mass), but the orbit of our planet was stable, and life soon emerged on it.