Jesse Rogerson

But the order is confusing.

Here in our solar system, we have the inner rocky ones.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars are rocky planets.

They're close to the sun.

And then you have the gassy ones, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and they're far from the sun.

And that is easily explained through like a temperature gradient where close to the star, it's hotter.

And things like gases and volatiles like ices don't really like being near hot things.

And so planets that are made of gases form farther away from the hot thing.

That's a pretty standard approach to planetary formation.

And this one throws that out the window because they found the order went rocky planet close to the star.

The next planet out is a gas planet.

Then the next one is a gas planet after that.

But then after that, the fourth planet is another rocky one.

Which is totally confusing in your like nebular theory idea where rocky planets close and gas planets far.

So it kind of threw them for the loop and the researchers were trying to figure out what to do with this.

They thought maybe it could be that that fourth one way out there originally started as a gas planet, but through some sort of like dynamics, like collisions or interactions, it lost its big envelope of gas.

But they couldn't make that work.

So what they they came down to was maybe it just because it's a small system with a with a small star, maybe that planet way out there at the edge just formed in a gas depleted area.

Basically, the two middle planets that are gas planets sucked it all up.

And so they that fourth one couldn't, you know, pull gas on and it just stayed rocky.