Life on any planet faces numerous existential threats — including the possibility of the planet getting kicked out of its solar system altogether. One team of researchers ran the numbers and found that the Earth is safe from such a catastrophe — almost.
Can a rogue star kick Earth out of the solar system? : Read more
Interesting report closing remarks concerning the habitable Earth.
"The researchers then took these results and applied them to our galactic neighborhood, using our knowledge of the positions, masses, and velocities of the stars nearest to us. They found that, on average, our planet only had a 1/15,000 chance of orbital destabilization over the course of our 4-billion-year history. In other words, for every 10,000 Earth-like planets in our neighborhood, only one has suffered a disaster. But things get much worse in the busy, compact central bulge of
the Milky Way. With all those stars, the chance of gravitational catastrophe is 160 times higher. Generally, that's pretty safe. But it does inform searches for life on distant exoplanets. The center of a galaxy is a generally unfriendly place, a hotbed of high-energy radiation and cosmic rays. And now we know it's also full of potentially deadly close calls between stars, close enough to knock
life-bearing worlds out of their orbits. If life has managed to arise on any of the worlds there, it's in for a tough time."
At the moment, we have 4186 exoplanets confirmed,
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia
In exoplanet research, there is not *10,000 Earth-like planets in our neighborhood* confirmed at this time. The simulation is interesting though in pointing the stat out here.
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