Kepler-36's 'Odd Couple' Defy Planet Formation Theories 70
astroengine writes "The two planets circling Kepler-36, a sun-like star in its senior years, are as different as Earth and Neptune. But unlike the hundreds of millions of miles that separate our solar system's rocky worlds from its gas giants, Kepler-36's brood come as close as 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers, or 0.01 AU) from one another — about five times the distance between Earth and the moon. This is yet another weird exoplanetary star system that defies conventional wisdom when it comes to planetary formation theories. 'The weirder they are, the more scientifically interesting they are,' Steve Howell, deputy project scientist with NASA's Kepler space telescope, told Discovery News."
I expect the reality of exoplanets to often be (Score:5, Interesting)
weirder and more fascinating than even the most far-out science-fiction authors have envisioned.
Try to picture the implications, for example, of a tidally-locked hot super-earth. You can readily have a habitable-temperature cold side while the other side is hot enough to boil the surface off to plasma. What happens on such a planet? Obviously it would take detailed physics simulations to find out, but I would expect things like tremendous winds transporting matter in the upper atmosphere from the hot side to the cool side, where it'd condense and rain out. Condensation at the surface would be like chemical vapor deposition, glazing the surfaces in metals or crystals (depending largely on the oxygen availability). Condensation in the atmosphere would lead to rain of solid particles - depending on various factors affecting the formation, it could be anything from sand to beads of glass to gemstones. Will all the liberated oxygen from the hot side (oxygen makes up a large portion of planetary crusts) rain back out or could there literally be a substantial oxygen-based atmosphere on the cool side? And hey, you've got a large mass of conductive material moving plasma and metallic gasses overhead - sounds like a recipe for uneven, irregular magnetic field generation and lots of "weird" stuff like localized field pinching, flares, and other phenomena that you normally only get in stars. Perhaps even localized bouts of fusion at the pinches. Just from the rapid and extreme differentiation in the atmosphere as solid matter precipitates, combined with the high conductivity, you should get crazy lightning. And of course losing your crust to boil-off has to have some huge effects on tectonics.
Such a shame that it's so hard to get probes to these alien worlds; I'm sure some of them would be truly incredible to see. Of course, we hardly even know what's in our own solar system (for example, the subsurface oceans of several large moons), so I guess better to start there first. Even our own solar system probably has some really weird stuff that we've never imaged before, like the hypothesized metallic frosts on Venus.
Re:A field in its infancy (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember hearing years back that we were trying to generate models that would accrete solar systems out of dust clouds - "from first principles". At the time I read about it, none of those models would generate a solar system like ours.
Many have suggested that our oversized moon (oversized relative to Earth) is responsible for higher life, intelligent life, technological life, etc. The Earth-moon system also seems to have required a "just-right" collision between two bodies of just-right size at the just-right aiming, angle, and velocity.
What if all of these conditions really are necessary - what if there isn't another more probable way to have intelligent life? (This presumes that we qualify as "intelligent" - most of the time I think we don't qualify as "wise". (as in "sapiens"))
What if in the "meaningful" universe, by some definition of meaningful, say the range of a Star Trek warp drive in a human lifetime, we really are alone?
At the very least, it makes laying waste to a functioning biosphere an even bigger crime.
One could also go nuts with religious implications.
Re:Another theory proven wrong and improved (Score:4, Interesting)
I so wish there were a big Eros-class asteroid in that kind of orbit with us.