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Astronomers Radically Reimagine the Making of the Planets


Start at center, with the sun. Our middle-aged star may be calmer than most, but otherwise insignificant. Its planets, however, are a different story.

First, Mercury: More burned interior than the complete planet, it may have lost its outer layers in a traumatic collision long ago. Next is Venus and Earth, twins in some respects, though oddly only one is fertile. Then there’s Mars, another small world, a world that, unlike Mercury, never loses layers; it just stops growing. Following Mars, we have a huge ring of leftover rocks, and then everything changes. Suddenly there’s Jupiter, so massive that it’s practically a half-moon, containing most of the material left over from our star’s creation. Before that were three more massive worlds – Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – made of gas and ice. The four gas giants have almost nothing in common with the four rocky planets, despite forming almost at the same time, from the same thing, around the same star. The eight planets of the solar system present a puzzle: Why these planets?

Now look out in front of the sun, beyond. Most stars contain planets of their own. Astronomers have discovered thousands of these distant star systems and planets. But strangely, so far they still find Nothing is ever like ours from afar. So the puzzle gets harder and harder: Why these, and why?

Expansion catalog of extrasolar planets, together with distant observations, dusty planet nursery and even new data from our own solar system, no longer agree with classical theories of how planets are formed. Planetary scientists, forced to abandon decades-old models, now realize that there may not be one grand unified theory of world creation — no single story that explains every planet. planets around every star, or even different orbits around our sun. “The laws of physics are the same everywhere, but the process of building planets is so complex that the system becomes chaotic.” Alessandro Morbidellia leading figure in theories of planetary formation and migration and an astronomer at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France.

Alessandro Morbidelli, an astronomer at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France, has put forward influential theories about planetary formation and migration.Photo: Mattia Balsamini / GEO Germany

However, these findings are spurring new research. Amid the chaos of world-building, patterns have emerged, leading astronomers toward powerful new ideas. The research teams are figuring out how dust and pebbles collect and how the planets move after they coalesce. Fierce debate rages about the timing of each step, and what determines the fate of a budding planet. At the heart of these debates are some of the oldest questions man has asked: How did we get here? Is there any other place like here?

A star and its Acolytes are born

Astronomers have had a basic understanding of the origins of the solar system for nearly 300 years. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who, like many Enlightenment thinkers who studied astronomy, published a theory in 1755 that is still pretty much true. He Written.

Indeed, we come from a diffuse cloud of gas and dust. Four and a half billion years ago, possibly propelled by a passing star or by the shock wave of a supernova, the cloud collapsed under its own gravity to form a new star. Its Then how did things go down? which we don’t really understand.

Once the sun ignites, the excess gas will revolve around it. Eventually, planets formed there. The classical model that explains this, known as the minimum-mass solar nebula, envisions a basic “protoplanetary disk” containing just enough hydrogen, helium, and heavier elements to form it. planets and asteroid belts are observed. The model, dating from 1977, assumes the planets formed where we see them today, starting as “small planets”, then incorporating all the matter in their regions like locusts eat every leaf in the field.



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