Jesse Rogerson

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 came down to was maybe it just, because it's a small system 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 that fourth one couldn't pull gas on, and it just stayed rocky.

which is an interesting theory.

I don't know.

It's tough to say if it's true or not because we're in this golden age of exoplanets where there's so much weird stuff and it's really hard to pull it under one envelope right now.

No, that's a good question.

I would say probably not.

I didn't investigate that, but the way we would know is looking at the orbit.

So when planets form naturally around a star, they're going to be usually in pretty circularized orbits.

But a planet that's captured would not be part of the flat plane and would not be in a nice circular orbit.