David Kipping

It's not that predictive.

How common are asteroid belts?

We don't know.

We can't detect asteroid belts.

Right, that's the question.

I'd love that.

Then we'd be back to Bode's Law.

But Bode's Law, I guess it's actually really a statement.

There's a great dynamicist at Princeton, Scott Tremaine, and he showed this, that if you just try to pack plants as close as you can, like just shove them in like sardines into the solar system, some of them will become unstable and just get kicked out, and the ones that are left will follow Bode's Law.

So it's not so much a statement of like, you know, some deity is putting these plants at the right places.

It's that if you just cram stuff in as much as you can, that's what you end up with.

Like you just can't cram plants any closer together.

So what is our current belief system when it comes to the formation of solar systems?

It appears to be very common.

I mean, when we look at the data we have from the Kepler mission, NASA's extraordinary successful mission, it detected itself something like 4,000 exoplanets.

And that tells us that on average, every single star has a planet.

So as far as we can tell, it's pretty hard for a star not to have planets.

It's like par for the course for that to happen.

That was a big breakthrough.

the second thing is as we kind of alluded to there's a huge diversity in them and the actual story we normally describe how they form is that there's some you know giant molecular cloud we call it so basically a giant cloud of hydrogen in space stuff that could have been blown off from a previous supernova or something or maybe even in the early universe just primordial gas from the big bang just this leftover hydrogen gas and if there's be some areas where there'll be slightly higher density in some areas where there's slightly lower density just due to random fluctuations