A Solar System That Shouldn't Exist
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Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper. Far, far away in a planetary system that has astounded astronomers exists some planets that are breaking our brains. We're going to discuss them here with astrophysicist and professor Jesse Rogerson from York University. Jesse, I love doing science news with you. Thank you for being on the show.
You're welcome. I love doing it, too. You ready to talk some science?
I am, and I love space. That's my jam. I always loved planets. I remember when planets were first discovered outside of our solar system when I was a kid and it blew my mind.
What solar system has astronomers puzzled?
Now we've mapped out tens of thousands of them and they are weird, some of them.
Yeah, 1995, that was the first official planet found around a sun-like star, 51 Peg B. 1995, it's a brand new field. And since I think the number is somewhere in the sixth, I don't know if it's 10,000 yet. I think it's 6,000 planets. And up until 1995, all we had was our solar system to go by. And there was this hypothesis, which is really a theory now, of how the solar system formed. It formed from a big gas cloud. Collapsed down into a star, flattened out into a disk around it, and the planets formed inside. And this theory on how our solar system formed explains some really important things about our solar system, like why our solar system is flat, for example. You know, it's great. I literally just taught this in my astronomy class.
Cool. I remember being nine years old. And I mean, we did have one thing going for us before 1995, because at that time, Pluto was still a planet. So there is some loss, but what the gain was, is this discovery. Anyway, let's talk about this solar system, planetary system, what, some hundred plus light years away from Earth. So kind of our neighbor in galactic scales or universal scales. These planets are orbiting a red dwarf star named LHS 1903. Tell me about what makes them so weird and why astronomers are so puzzled by this system.
So when you look at this system, so red dwarf stars are the most common type of star in the universe. So you expect to find planets around them. And there's both rocky and gassy planets around this star, just like we have rocky and gassy planets. 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.
Because if Uranus existed close to the sun, we would have a hot gas problem. Sorry, that's a different interview that I do on the show. Okay, so the kind of like structure or composition of planets kind of makes sense. Rocky ones close, big gas ones far away. This is kind of our picture of what star systems should look like with planets.
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.
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