Planets in all the wrong places

The Christian Science Monitor ^ | 03/06/06 | Michelle Thaller

[KevinDavis]

At my age, I really should have expected this to happen. All of a sudden I'm seeing lots of little clues that the 1980s are making something of a nostalgic comeback. High school kids I speak to as part of my job have started wearing thin ties and studded belts, and I thoroughly approve of their newly spiked and teased hairstyles. The other day I saw a pair of plastic sandals (remember Jellies?) in a store window and heard Bon Jovi playing on a "classic rock" station. That's right; I'm a golden oldie.

Take, for instance, the fact that when I was in graduate school, a mere 10 years ago, we had no knowledge of planets outside our own solar system. Since we had only one example of a planetary system (our own), we studied its patterns and characteristics and tried to explain them with our best theories of planet formation. It made sense that all the planets close to the sun were small and rocky. After all, the sun puts off so much heat and solar wind pressure that it must have blown all the light material around it farther out into the solar system. That's where you find the giant planets, after all, like Jupiter and Saturn. More volatile substances, like hydrogen, water, or methane, needed the cooler, calmer conditions in the outer solar system to condense. More condensing material meant bigger planets, and - hey! That must be why our outer planets are much bigger than the Earth. It all made sense.

[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from 3/06/2006. Thanks KevinDavis.

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