Could Earth ever leave our solar system?

In his short story " The Wandering Earth", Cixin depicts a scenario in which the leaders of the planet agree to leave the solar system in order to escape an impending solar storm.

The story is based on fiction but could Earth ever leave the system?

Matteo Ceriotti told Live Science that it was very unlikely.

"unlikely" does not mean it is impossible, and Ceriotti suggested a way it could be done.

He said that the Earth could be moved away from its path through the actions of a massive object.

If Earth were a super-Earth, what would it look like?

The Earth would be disrupted by a flyby in which the Earth and object would exchange energy. If the object was large enough, fast enough and close enough, it could project the Earth into an escape path.

According to Timothy Davis, a senior lecturer in physics and astronomy at the University of the U.K., it is possible for Earth to be ejected from the solar system.

Right now the planets are in a stable position around the sun. If the sun were to have a close encounter with another star, it could cause Earth to be ejected from the solar system.

It is doubtful that this scenario will happen in the foreseeable future.

It's rare, Davis said. The star Gliese 710 is expected to come quite close to the sun in around a million years' time, but it is unlikely to affect the planets.

It's unlikely that external forces will force Earth out of the solar system any time soon, but could humanity build machines that could shift the planet so that it ends up being ejected?

The amount of energy needed to remove the Earth from its position in the solar system is so large that it's not likely to happen.

There is a question about why Earth isn't perfect.

What would happen if Earth broke away from the sun? If our home planet ended up being permanently ejected from the universe, what would happen?

Ceriotti said that if Earth left the solar system, it would most likely cause the decimation of the planet's life.

Earth's global climate is very delicate because of a fine balance of radiation incoming from the sun and energy dissipated to deep space. Ceriotti said that temperatures would change quickly if this was to change.

Davis said most life on Earth wouldn't survive the move away from the sun.

It's very likely that most of the life on Earth would disappear if we left the solar system. Most of the energy used by Earth's living organisms comes from the sun.

The further Earth moved away from the sun, the cooler it would get. It was going to freeze over. Davis said that the only natural source of heat was the decay of radioactive elements in the Earth's crust.

Davis said that life would be doomed if it lingered. Complex life would likely disappear completely if some 'extremophiles' lived from this energy. The Earth's temperature would only be able to be maintained at a temperature of minus 230 degrees C. Earth would be left as a dead, icy world at these temperatures.

Ceriotti said that our solar system will eventually be disturbed so much that Earth will either be knocked out of it or destroyed completely.

In approximately 4.5 billion years, our galaxy is predicted to collide with our nearest neighbor. The solar system is likely to be disrupted by a collision of millions of stars. Ceriotti spoke. In the next 5 billion years or so, it is predicted that the sun will take over the Earth.

We won't have to worry about leaving the solar system for a long time. It's probably a possibility.

It was originally published on Live Science