article_snippet: (CNN)It turns out that Jupiter may be more than just an enormous ball of gas spinning a few hundred million miles farther out in the solar system.
article_snippet: Jupiter, however, put an end to those early occupiers of the inner orbits, bulldozing in and sweeping those early occupiers of the inner orbits into the sun, according to a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
article_snippet: Jupiter's epic, planet-shattering journey toward the sun and back out again laid the foundations for the creation of Earth and the other smaller planets nearby -- Mercury, Venus and Mars.
article_snippet: We work suggests that Jupiter's inward-outward migration could have destroyed a first generation of planets and set the stage for the formation of the mass-depleted terrestrial planets that our solar system has today," said Konstantin Batygin of Caltech, one of the authors of a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
article_snippet: Maybe that's because of Jupiter's destructive romp in the early history of our solar system.
article_snippet: He and He co-author -- Gregory Laughlin of University of California, Santa Cruz -- are building on a scenario of Jupiter's migration that was previously put forward by other scientists.
article_snippet: Known as the Grand Tack scenario, He and his co-author -- Gregory Laughlin of University of California, Santa Cruz -- describes Jupiter getting drawn toward the sun in the early era of our solar system thanks to our solar system huge mass.
article_snippet: The two gas giants start to exert gravitational influence on one another, entering a planetary dance that eventually sends The two gas giants back farther out into our solar system.
article_snippet: Batygin and Laughlin suggest that during our solar system inward journey, Jupiter dragged a load of planetary building blocks, known as planetesimals, along with our solar system.
article_snippet: On its way back out, Jupiter left some remaining planetesimals in its wake -- the building blocks that over millions of years would come to form Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars.
highlights_snippet: An epic migration by Jupiter led to destruction of "super-Earths"
  