'Godzilla' Earth Discovered

[t@nya]

This new rocky planet is going to be rewriting the scientific textbooks.

And, potentially, any future editions of GURPS Space.

Not only is it a rocky planet that weights as much as 17 Earths (which scientists thought was impossible, since they believed such a planet would end up vacuuming up all the gas in the area and turn into a gas giant), but it is in a system that is 11 billion years old, only 3 billion years after the big bang, at a time when rocky materials are supposed to be scarce.

Scientists are going to be doing a lot of head scratching about this one. :)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-0...t-star/5496112

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by t@nya

Scientists are going to be doing a lot of head scratching about this one. :)

I don't know about that, there seems to be a lot of conclusion jumping in there. The two biggest ones being the planet is as old as the star and nothing can strip an atmosphere from a gas giant. I suppose high density means it's made of rock is potentially questionable too.

For that matter, how firm is the age of the star? If there really aren't any heavy element lines in its spectrum, which is one of the ways you diagnose it as being old, then there is a pretty interesting anomaly if it has rocky planets. If they actually formed with the system, then there is some mechanism for sorting heavy from light elements when a star forms, and absence of those heavy metal lines actually *doesn't* mean something is an old population star.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I don't know about that, there seems to be a lot of conclusion jumping in there. The two biggest ones being the planet is as old as the star and nothing can strip an atmosphere from a gas giant. I suppose high density means it's made of rock is potentially questionable too.

They know stuff can strip the gas off of a gas giant. Or, at least, my understanding of 55 Cancri E is that it's believed to be the remaining core of a gas-stripped gas giant. The fact that they're skeptical of this one being the same suggests that there's something else going on that's too complicated for a pop-sci article to get into.

But "The scientists are going to have to rewrite the planet-forming model" has been the story ever since they started discovering worlds. We only knew about 9 worlds for a very long time in one solar system. Now, suddenly, we're getting mountains of data from other worlds, and lots of them are bat-guano crazy. This is just another one to toss up onto the pile of crazy, along with the planet o' diamond, the black doom-world with a giant, glowing red eye, and that planet circling a pulsar (Wow!)

[Figleaf23]

I suspected all along that the universe couldn't be a boring and rote as portrayed in GURPS Space (4e).

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Now, suddenly, we're getting mountains of data from other worlds, and lots of them are bat-guano crazy. This is just another one to toss up onto the pile of crazy, along with the planet o' diamond, the black doom-world with a giant, glowing red eye, and that planet circling a pulsar (Wow!)

There do seem to be a lot of "these planets shouldn't have been able to form or survive at this distance from this star" cases. Maybe planets move around a lot more than we think possible, even from star to star?

[Randyman]

Or maybe we need to swallow a big glass of Humble Juice and admit that we don't know what we thought we did...

...which is what some of the scientists who are active in the field actually seem to be doing. Good for them. :) Others should follow that example.