Do you ever wonder how the universe is going to destroy our planet over billions of years?
The scientists at the University of Toronto did a study on what would happen if a star flew too close to the sun.
While they're not expecting a neighboring star to come through the middle of our system, they looked at the potentially devastating effects of minor shifts in the orbits of the solar system's planets.
The effects of a possible stellar fly-by on the simulations were looked at up to 5000 years later.
Some simulations ended early when a planet was thrown from the sun. That's really bad!
It's pretty shocking. The scientists found that a small change in Neptune's distance to the Sun could cause the entire solar system to fall apart.
The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri, which is about 24.8% away.
The collapse of the solar system could take billions of years to happen.
"These weak perturbations don't destroy the solar system immediately, they just wiggle it around a little bit, and over the next millions or billions of years something goes unstable," he said.
960 of the simulations resulted in small changes.
The researchers concluded that this kind of stuff only happens in our corner of the universe once every 100 billion years or so.
You won't have to worry about it unless you plan on living forever.
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