Help support TMP


"Forbidden planets: Understanding alien worlds once ..." Topic


4 Posts

All members in good standing are free to post here. Opinions expressed here are solely those of the posters, and have not been cleared with nor are they endorsed by The Miniatures Page.

For more information, see the TMP FAQ.


Back to the Science Plus Board


Areas of Interest

General

Featured Hobby News Article


Featured Link


Featured Ruleset


Featured Showcase Article

Little Yellow Clamps

Need some low-pressure clamps?


Featured Profile Article

Galloping Jack Reports from CanCon

Mal Wright Fezian journeys to and from the Australian national convention - and tells us what he thinks of panicking tank hordes and flat terrain!


280 hits since 19 Jul 2017
©1994-2024 Bill Armintrout
Comments or corrections?

Tango0119 Jul 2017 9:09 p.m. PST

…thought impossible.

"When astronomers discovered the first exoplanet around a normal star 2 decades ago, there was joy—and bewilderment. The planet, 51 Pegasi b, was half as massive as Jupiter, but its 4-day orbit was impossibly close to the star, far smaller than the 88-day orbit of Mercury. Theorists who study planet formation could see no way for a planet that big to grow in such tight confines around a newborn star. It could have been a freak, but soon, more "hot Jupiters" turned up in planet searches, and they were joined by other oddities: planets in elongated and highly tilted orbits, even planets orbiting their stars "backward"—counter to the star's rotation.
The planet hunt accelerated with the launch of NASA's Kepler spacecraft in 2009, and the 2500 worlds it has discovered added statistical heft to the study of exoplanets—and yet more confusion. Kepler found that the most common type of planet in the galaxy is something between the size of Earth and Neptune—a "super-Earth," which has no parallel in our solar system and was thought to be almost impossible to make. Now, ground-based telescopes are gathering light directly from exoplanets, rather than detecting their presence indirectly as Kepler does, and they, too, are turning up anomalies. They have found giant planets several times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting their star at more than twice the distance Neptune is from the sun—another region where theorists thought it was impossible to grow large planets. Other planetary systems looked nothing like our orderly solar system, challenging the well-worn theories that had been developed to explain it…."
Main page
link


Amicalement
Armand

Bowman20 Jul 2017 5:43 a.m. PST

Yep, it's hard to develop rock solid theories on planetary evolution based just on one example…..our own solar system. It's now a gold mine for the observational astrophysicists and "catch up" time for the theoretical ones.

Shagnasty Supporting Member of TMP20 Jul 2017 10:02 a.m. PST

Sheldon still has a chance to a Nobel!

Tango0121 Jul 2017 12:22 p.m. PST

(smile)


Amicalement
Armand

Sorry - only verified members can post on the forums.