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Mercury-sized exoplanet discovered, catch it while you can
"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message ... It's amazing that in such a short amount of time, we've come from looking for the "holy-grail" of Earth-sized planets to already discovering things as tiny as Mercury now! However this planet in this star system, KIC 12557548, is so close to its sun that it's orbiting every 15 hours, which means that's slowly boiling away. It is estimated that it will not even exist in 100 million years. It's even likely that it was once a much larger planet. It goes to show how remarkably stably the planets in our own solar system are arranged. Not only is Earth in a Goldilocks zone for life, but the rest of the planets can be said to be in their own personal Goldilocks zones, as they are in no danger of being destroyed by their star. Or rather, the planets that were not in relatively stable orbits were ejected long ago. Its not surprising that in a solar system 4 billion years old has dropped into a stable configuration. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/d...anet-0517.html Yousuf Khan |
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Mercury-sized exoplanet discovered, catch it while you can
On 18/05/2012 10:26 AM, Peter Webb wrote:
"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message It goes to show how remarkably stably the planets in our own solar system are arranged. Not only is Earth in a Goldilocks zone for life, but the rest of the planets can be said to be in their own personal Goldilocks zones, as they are in no danger of being destroyed by their star. Or rather, the planets that were not in relatively stable orbits were ejected long ago. Its not surprising that in a solar system 4 billion years old has dropped into a stable configuration. Probably true, but we're seeing some strange looking solar systems that are also pretty old. In fact, this particular solar system is an orange-dwarf star, which is a somewhat smaller star than our Sun, meaning it will be longer lived. We don't know how old this system is currently, but it's like that this star is also now several billion years old. So just because a star is billions of years old, doesn't mean that things are stable yet for it. Yousuf Khan |
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Mercury-sized exoplanet discovered, catch it while you can
On May 18, 6:32*pm, Yousuf Khan wrote:
Probably true, but we're seeing some strange looking solar systems that are also pretty old. In fact, this particular solar system is an orange-dwarf star, which is a somewhat smaller star than our Sun, meaning it will be longer lived. We don't know how old this system is currently, but it's like that this star is also now several billion years old. So just because a star is billions of years old, doesn't mean that things are stable yet for it. * * * * Yousuf Khan Given an infinite number of solar systems every possible variety is likely to exist somewhere. There is not remotely enough data, as yet, to be able to draw any firm conclusions as to the likely and unlikely. There has been no new probe to our own solar system which has not completely rewritten the text books. Our wild guesses as to the number and orbital position of the past and present Solar planets is constantly changing with each new discovery and theory. |
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