One question I get asked a lot is "why are other planets orbiting so close to their stars?" The simple answer is observation bias. Planets that orbit close to their stars have short periods, making them easier to discover. In order to find a planet it must make several trips around the star before enough data is collected to find the planet. Only in the movies do astronomers take a single picture and discover something. In real life it takes a lot of work. If a planet orbits a star in a hundred days then a couple of years of data would be enough to confirm its existence. If the planet were like Jupiter which takes twelve years to orbit our sun then astronomers would need, at the very least, a couple of decades to confirm its existence. We are a long way away from knowing what a "normal" stellar system would look like because we haven't been searching long enough to find the ones farther out. It doesn't mean you can't check out the ones that have been discovered. Nasa has several interactives that allow you to explore the confirmed planets. The New Worlds Atlas is a little out of date, listing only 564 planets.
AuthorI have no idea how to write blogs so I just write about wacky thoughts that run through my mind and leave a bit of a residue behind. Archives
May 2018
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