Subtitle: "An abundance of medium-sized worlds is challenging planet-formation models."
doi:10.1038/480302a
doi:10.1038/480302a
Their models are wrong? I mean challenged. Maybe they should just make up favorable data like climate change models. I think man forgets his place in the universe.
As the technology gets better the more we find out we don’t know.
I’d be interesting in knowing what percentage of these unexpected planets are orbiting single stars like our sun which is in a minority.
“You can’t just tweak the parameters. You need to think about the physics.”
No, really? LOL!
“Their very existence upsets conventional models of planetary formation and, furthermore, most of them are in tight orbits around their host star, precisely where the modellers say they shouldn’t be.”
They likely migrated inward.
It just shows that solar systems are like snowflakes, and ours may be a thankfully placid freak.
I wonder if our world is just a wimpy “super-earth’. Our study of planetary systems prior systems before the 1990’s was like studying animals, but being confined to one small area. We might be on the short end of the bell curve as far as planetary mass goes. Considering that the planets that are smaller than earth that we have hard evidence for have very thin or no atmospheres.
Sounds like a sampling bias, we can only detect the planet that our systems can see.
As for planetary formation models, we have a dearth of real data to test our theories on. No surprise then that an input of real data shows deficiencies in our models.
