The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Topic started by: rangerrebew on June 30, 2017, 05:57:46 pm
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News & Technology
28 June 2017
Planets in other star systems fit a puzzling pattern
Tiago Campante/Peter Devine
By Mika McKinnon
EXOPLANETARY systems are like peas in a pod, whatever type of star the planets orbit. This challenges our ideas about how such systems form.
A team led by Lauren Weiss at the University of Montreal in Canada has looked at 909 planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope in 355 systems. All planets in a given system seem to be close in size and similarly spaced in their orbits when compared with planets in other systems. “We see this pattern happening again and again,” says Weiss – regardless of what kind of star these planets are orbiting (arxiv.org/abs/1706.06204).
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23531324-100-planets-in-other-star-systems-fit-a-puzzling-pattern/
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A team led by Lauren Weiss at the University of Montreal in Canada has looked at 909 planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope in 355 systems. All planets in a given system seem to be close in size and similarly spaced in their orbits when compared with planets in other systems. “We see this pattern happening again and again,” says Weiss – regardless of what kind of star these planets are orbiting (arxiv.org/abs/1706.06204).
Perhaps the types of planetary systems that we are finding are limited by the methods being used to search for them. That is, they all fit a pattern because that pattern is the type of system that we can find with current methods. As new methods develop, we may start finding systems that no longer fit that pattern, or that fit other patterns.
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Perhaps the types of planetary systems that we are finding are limited by the methods being used to search for them. That is, they all fit a pattern because that pattern is the type of system that we can find with current methods. As new methods develop, we may start finding systems that no longer fit that pattern, or that fit other patterns.
Either that, or they just threw out "outliers" in order to cherry pick the data they wanted to use. I suspect the latter. In our system, Bode's Law is just a mnemonic.