Saturday, April 02, 2011
All mature suns have planets surely. Why the fuss?
All mature suns have planets surely. Why the fuss?
We are starting to detect planets around suns. People seem to be surprised.
Of course it is quite difficult to make these observations, and we know that we will not detect them all, since most of these methods depend on the plane of the orbit being near the observer.
But surely we should not be surprised. Indeed I would have guessed that all suns have planets or planets forming. All the things that we have observed before in the universe has basically been spinning and whirling stuff around which condenses in some way, be they galaxies, suns, planets or whatever. That's just what matter does in space. Or another way of seeing this is that there seems to he plenty of angular momentum around the place.
We should rather be very surprised if we found any suns without planets, and this would be much harder to convincingly find.
Are we still bugged with 'chosen' status?
martinW
We are starting to detect planets around suns. People seem to be surprised.
Of course it is quite difficult to make these observations, and we know that we will not detect them all, since most of these methods depend on the plane of the orbit being near the observer.
But surely we should not be surprised. Indeed I would have guessed that all suns have planets or planets forming. All the things that we have observed before in the universe has basically been spinning and whirling stuff around which condenses in some way, be they galaxies, suns, planets or whatever. That's just what matter does in space. Or another way of seeing this is that there seems to he plenty of angular momentum around the place.
We should rather be very surprised if we found any suns without planets, and this would be much harder to convincingly find.
Are we still bugged with 'chosen' status?
martinW
