(ORDO NEWS) — Researchers from the Universities of Bern and Geneva have shown that the solar system has a very rare architecture in the universe, in which the size of the planets grows relatively monotonously as they move away from the parent star.
Most planetary systems are made up of planets of roughly the same size.
Astronomers say: the Sun is an ordinary star, the Earth is an ordinary planet. But maybe at least the solar system is very rare? Somehow that’s good to hear
Everything seems to be in order in our solar system: the smaller rocky planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth or Mars – orbit relatively close to our star.
On the other hand, large gas and ice giants – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune – move in orbits far from the Sun.
But researchers from the Universities of Bern and Geneva and the National Center for Scientific Research (NCCR) PlanetS have shown that our planetary system is rare. Most likely, there are very few systems with such a distribution of planets.
Like peas in a pod
“More than a decade ago, astronomers noticed, based on observations with the then revolutionary Kepler telescope, that planets in other systems typically resemble their neighbors in size and mass like peas in a pod,” said Lokesh Mishra, lead author of the study.
“But for a long time it was not clear whether this discovery was due to the limitations of observation methods.”
Therefore, the researcher developed a framework for identifying differences and similarities between the architectures of planetary systems.
At the same time, he discovered that there are not two such architectures, but four.
“We call these four types ‘similar’, ‘ordered’, ‘anti-ordered’ and ‘mixed’,” says Mishra.
Planetary systems in which the masses of neighboring planets are close have a similar architecture.
Ordered planetary systems are those in which the mass of the planets increases with distance from the star, just as in our solar system.
If, on the other hand, the mass of the planets decreases with distance from the star, the researchers speak of an anti-ordered architecture of the system.
In a mixed architecture, planetary masses vary greatly from planet to planet.
“Our results show that ‘like’ planetary systems are the most common type of architecture.
About eight out of ten planetary systems around the stars visible in the night sky have a “similar” architecture,” says Mishra.
“It also explains why this architecture was discovered in the first few months of the Kepler mission.”
What surprised the team is that “ordered” architecture – one that includes the solar system – seems to be the rarest type.
According to Mishra, there are signs that the formation of architecture is influenced both by the mass of the gas and dust disk from which the planets arise, and the abundance of heavy elements in the parent star: “From fairly small disks and stars with a small amount of heavy elements, “like” planetary systems.
Large massive disks and a large number of heavy elements in a star give rise to ordered and anti-ordered systems.
Medium-sized disks breed mixed systems. Dynamic interactions between planets, including collisions, also affect the final architecture.”
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