The fifth brightest star in our evening sky is younger, blue, and apparently devoid of huge planets. New JWST observations deepen the thriller.
There’s an amazing sin that scientists all too typically commit: by assuming, based mostly solely on a small variety of examples (probably as few as one), that one of the best scientific story we are able to reconstruct for these examples apply to all related techniques universally. Maybe there’s no larger instance of a discipline the place this sin has been dedicated than within the science of exoplanets. Up till the early Nineteen Nineties, we historically assumed that different planetary techniques can be like our personal: with interior, rocky planets, an asteroid-like belt, gasoline big worlds, after which a Kuiper-like belt. Right now, with 1000’s of exoplanets below our belt, we all know of an enormous number of ways in which this isn’t true:
- planets might be any mass and any distance from their father or mother stars,
- many super-Jupiter planets, in addition to many planets between the mass of Earth and Neptune, abound,
- and that some stellar techniques even have completely different numbers of belts than our personal Photo voltaic System’s two.
Moreover, all stars don’t seem to have planets; simply those which have sufficiently considerable fractions of…
