Likeliness of the migration of Neptune
Previous data within this paper has been to point out the fact that
there is little contemporary evidence to make the assertion that our
solar system is typical for the galaxy in its ability to send nitrogen
iceberg fragments into interstellar space, however, due to the detection
of exoplanets being more likely based on the closeness of the planet to
its star, the data is admittedly somewhat biased. This section,
therefore, aims to prove through models of stellar systems that the
migration of Neptune (which caused the removal of large amounts of KBOs)
is rare as far as planetary systems go.
The migration of Neptune into farther reaches of the solar system is
believed to be due to the stress between it and Jupiter’s and Saturn’s
orbits, with the large mass difference between them causing Neptune to
be pushed far out towards the current location of the Kuiper belt¹⁷.
Jupiter is nearly 19 times more massive than Neptune, and Saturn is
nearly 6 times more massive than Neptune¹⁸. This all means that the
migration of Neptune was heavily reliant on the large mass differences
between it and the two gas giants. These large mass differences are
mostly nontypical for planetary systems, however. The most common
planetary system type is the “similar” type, where the planets are all
similar to each other in mass¹⁹. If this were to occur, that would mean
that the mass difference between the planets would not be large enough
to have Neptune migrate as highly as it had, meaning it would be
unlikely to disrupt the Kuiper belt as significantly²⁰. The following
equation is the parameters set for a system to be classified as
“similar” in structure: