Solar System material reaching neighboring star systems

¹ Astronomical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, 05960 Tatranská Lomnica, Slovakia
² Faculty of Mathematics, Physics, and Informatics, Commenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
³ Astronomical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia

^★ Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 18 December 2025
Accepted: 10 March 2026

Abstract

Context. In our Solar System, few macroscopic objects have been observed to be moving in hyperbolic orbits and, thus, they must have originated from interstellar space. Some meteoroids are also suspected to have an interstellar origin. Analogously, some cometary nuclei have left the Solar System and a similar behavior can be expected for a number of meteoroids.

Aims. We investigate whether meteoroids ejected from the Solar System have the capacity to reach neighboring stars in the future. We also study the minimum distances between these stars and real comets that have managed to escape the Sun’s potential.

Methods. The trajectories of hypothetical meteoroid particles and real cometary nuclei were integrated numerically. To estimate the precision of the integration, we simultaneously used two integration algorithms: the Runge-Kutta method and the symplectic integrator known as Leapfrog. We employed the CNS5 catalog of neighboring stars and the CODE catalog of future orbits of comets.

Results. Since the heliocentric speeds of the meteoroids leaving the Solar System are relatively low, only 5 of the 3893 considered stars can be approached by these meteoroids within 10 au. The other stars are too fast and end up escaping from the vicinity of the system before any particle approaches their innermost region. Of the 123 considered comets, 14 are predicted to approach a star within 50 000 au during the next 5 Myr, but none of them will end up closer than 4633 au. Because of the relatively large uncertainty of the determination of input parameters of considered stars, our result unfortunately suffers from a large uncertainty.

Conclusions. Our results indicate that only a very small amount of material from the Solar System can be delivered to the systems of neighboring stars.