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

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

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.