Oort Cloud Ecology. III. The Sun left the parent star cluster shortly after the giant planets formed

Abstract

The Sun was born in a clustered environment with 10,000 other stars. Being an isolated star today, the Sun must have left the nest. We do not directly know when that happened, how violent the ejection was, or how far the Solar siblings have drifted apart. The mass of the fragile outer Opic-Oort cloud, (between $r_{\rm inner} \sim 30,000$\,au and $200\,000$au from the Sun) and the orbital distribution of planetesimals in the inner Hills-Oort cloud (between $\sim 1000$\,au and $\sim 30\,000$ au) are sensitive to the dynamical processes involving the Sun in the parent cluster. We aim at understanding the extend to which observing the Oort cloud constrains the Sun's birth environment. This is achieved by a combination of theoretical arguments and N-body simulations. We show that the current mass of the Opic-Oort cloud (between 0.2 and $2.0$ Earth masses) is best explained if the Sun left the nest within $\sim 20$\,Myr after the giant planets formed and migrated. As a consequence, the possible dynamical encounter with another star carving the Kuiper belt, the Sun's abduction of Sedna, and other perturbations induced by nearby stars then must have happened shortly after the giant planets in the Solar system formed, but before the Sun left the parent cluster. Signatures of the time spend in the parent cluster must still be visible in the outer parts of the Solar system today. The strongest constraints will be the discovery of a population of relatively low-eccentricity ($e < 0.9$) inner Oort-cloud (but $500 < a < 10^4$\,au) objects.