Four newly discovered planets could help give new insights in what Earth was like in its early days dailymail.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailymail.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How shrinking planets might explain missing planets
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May 27, 2021
Artist’s concept of Gliese 1214b, a mini-Neptune and possible shrinking planet. Worlds like this may sometimes lose their thick atmospheres and literally decrease in size, becoming super-Earths. Shrinking planets might help explain a mystery gap in exoplanet sizes. Image via NASA/ ESA/ G. Bacon (STScI)/ L. Kreidberg & J. Bean (U. Chicago)/ H. Knutson (Caltech)/ AAS Nova.
Can planets shrink? New research from the Flatiron Institute in New York City suggests they can. Shrinking planets might be the solution to the mystery gap in the sizes of exoplanets discovered so far. Planets between 1.5 and two times Earth’s radius are mostly missing. The idea is that mini-Neptunes – smaller than Neptune but larger than super-Earths – might lose their thick atmospheres and thereby decrease in size.
Rozlousknuta vesmírná záhada: Proč nenalézáme planety trochu větší než Země nedd.tiscali.cz - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nedd.tiscali.cz Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Data collected on the more than 4,000 exoplanets found so far has revealed a very interesting pattern – some of them seem to be shrinking in size. In fact, there are very few exoplanets that are between 1.5 and 2 times larger than Earth that are in close proximity of their host stars (this is called the small planet radius gap).
According to a new study, it is quite possible that exoplanets located close to their stars were much larger in size but after billions of years they ended up shrinking. Trevor David, who is an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, said, “The overarching point is that planets are not the static spheres of rocks and gas we sometimes tend to think of them as.”
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