Jupiter Destroyed The Inner Solar System In Early Days

In early days of solar system, Jupiter destroyed everything that came in its way, researchers have found.

A statistical study based on Jupiter's wandering orbit also found that Earth owes its very existence to those collisions.

Exoplanetary searches, like NASA's Kepler Mission, suggest a "default" mode of planet formation, according to which systems that develop around Sun-like stars tend to produce at least one massive, close-orbiting planet.

"The innermost realm of our own solar system, by contrast, is completely, mysteriously empty," UCSC's Greg Laughlin, one of the lead authors of the study, said in the press release. "So it was the context provided by the extrasolar planets that gave us a clue that something is unusual in our own."

It was only three years ago when scientists explained the reason behind those missing planets.

"Our theory predicts that there should be an anti-correlation between the presence of super-Earth planets with short orbital periods, and the presence of a giant planet with an orbital period of roughly a year or more," Laughlin said. "The validity of this anti-correlation should be testable with NASA's TESS Mission, currently planned for launch in 2017."

Findings of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.