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Astronomers have a problem on their hands: How can you make planets if you don't have enough of the building blocks? A new study finds that protoplanetary disks—the envelopes of dust and gas around young stars that give rise to planets—seem to contain orders of magnitude too little material to produce the planets.
"This work is telling us that we really have to rethink our planetary formation theories," says astronomer Gijs Mulders of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who was not involved in the research.
Stars are born from colossal clouds of gas and dust and, in their earliest stages, are surrounded by a thin disk of material. Dust grains within this halo collide, sometimes sticking together. The clumps build up into planetary cores, which are big enough to gravitationally attract additional dust and gas, eventually forming planets.
But many details about this process remain unknown, such as just how quickly planets arise from the disk, and how efficient they are in capturing material. The disks, surrounded by an obscuring haze of gas and dust, are difficult to observe. But radio telescopes can penetrate the haze and investigate young stars. The brightness of radio waves emitted by dust in the disk can be used to give a reasonable estimate of its overall mass.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 02 2018, @08:16AM (5 children)
We have evidence of smallish things clumping together - we've even landed on such things. We also have evidence for there to be enough mass around a sun to form planets (we're even living on such a thing), and have indirect evidence for thousands more. Circular orbits, such as what almost everything near us are in, support the slow and steady accumulation of a local cloud of matter which has non-zero angular momentum much better than they do invasion of matter from outside (as the chances of being slingshot into such an orbit are unimaginably small).
So to counter their theory that it's impossible, I jokingly posit the oppsite, extending the above introductory sentence - it's absolutely trivial. The fact we aren't seeing any is because it happens so quickly and naturally that the chances of detecting the process partially underway is too low with current technology. This seems just as testable a hypothesis as theirs. Let's go fund another bigger telescope and find out.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @12:20PM (4 children)
One of the strongest forces is electromagnetism, but only recently has it been acknowledged that charge-carrying plasma pervades interstellar and intergalactic space.
The Electric Universe model suggests that massive bodies are formed from clouds of dust when enormous Birkeland currents run through that gas, pinching it via tremendous force into fully formed star systems, where the star not a fusion-driven energy producer, but rather an electrically driven node in the electrically connected Universe.
This also explains the very strange set of exoplanetary systems that have been found in recent years, many of which just make no sense under the long-standing model of planetary formation by gravitational accretion. For one, nobody expected hot gas giants orbiting their stars closely.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @01:40PM (2 children)
there's also the fact that some atom nuclei are made from protons (like hidrogen), some are made from protons and neutrons, but nobody mentions the neurons.
electrons do different things to neurons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:04PM (1 child)
*facepalm*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @04:32AM
No, he's right. His electrons are doing things to my neurons.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday October 03 2018, @12:06AM
I really never thought I would see The Electric Universe cited unironically on Soylent News.
Please log in so that I know who I'm laughing at.
Unless of course it's some sort of joke which went right over my head, in which case well played sir.