Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network that allows them to travel much faster through the Solar System than was previously possible. Such paths can transport comets and asteroids from Jupiter to Neptune in less than a decade and to 100 astronomical units in less than a century. They could be used to rapidly send spacecraft to the far reaches of our solar system, as well as to monitor and comprehend near-Earth objects that may collide with our planet.

In their paper, which was published in the November 25, 2020 issue of Science Advances, the researchers looked at the dynamical structure of these routes. They found that they form a connected series of arches inside what are called “space manifolds,” which go from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. This newly found “celestial autobahn” or “celestial highway” works over several decades instead of the usual hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

Jupiter and the strong gravitational forces it has are linked to the most noticeable arch structures. Such manifolds control the number of Jupiter-family comets (comets with orbital periods of 20 years) and Centaurs, which are small bodies in the solar system, on time scales that have never been seen before. Some of these objects will hit Jupiter, and others will be thrown out of the Solar System.

The structures were found by gathering numbers about millions of orbits in our Solar System and figuring out how these orbits fit into space manifolds that were already known. The results need to be looked into more, both to figure out how they could be used by spacecraft and to figure out how such manifolds behave near the Earth, controlling asteroid and meteorite collisions as well as the growing number of man-made objects in the Earth-Moon system.