Re:As Planet Discoveries Pile Up, a Gap Appears in the Pattern
by PC_LOAD_LETTER on Friday May 17, 2019 @10:49AM
(#19940104)
That would be compelling if there were planets up to a certain size. However, that's not the case. You have increasingly large planets, a big gap, and then increasingly large planets again. It's a bimodal distribution, which implies some other factor at hand than just the law of averages.
Re:As Planet Discoveries Pile Up, a Gap Appears in the Pattern
by pault on Friday May 17, 2019 @10:26AM
(#19939887)
Sounds to me like putting sugar on a plate and vibrating it at a certain frequency. The same patterns always form for the same frequency. Why should solar systems be any different, given the overall mass of the star and raw material?
Re:As Planet Discoveries Pile Up, a Gap Appears in the Pattern
by JoeAltmaier on Friday May 17, 2019 @10:30AM
(#19939930)
Maybe more like shaking a plate of magnets around. Shake a little, they start to clump up. Shake long enough, there's only one large magnet stack. If the shake time follows a pattern, then most places will have similar planetary distribution e.g. few small planets and a couple of big ones?
I am imagining it like pouring a cup of sugar on a dinner plate and shaking the plate around until the amount of sugar on the plate is sort of stable. The excess material ends up outside the solar system (Oort cloud / kuiper belt) or part of gas giant cores and moons.
With that, there is only so much material in the inner solar system to work with and the law of averages works out and we end up with similar sized planets.
I would assert a hypothesis that a ratio of material in the inner solar system is linked, in some way, to the size of the star. That it is unlikely there will be massive earths out there in the inner solar system because of this natural distribution of material around a star.
I have no formal training at all. Just an IT nerd that watches a lot of Kurzgesagt.