2023-07-12 06:00:13
Scientists at the University of Warwick have looked at the birth environment of planets, those regions of gas and dust that swirl around a central star, called protoplanetary disks. They brought to light (Light is all the electromagnetic waves visible to the eye…) a new method of forming planets which had not been described until then.
This is how a small planet can form sandwiched between two larger planets
Credit: University of Warwick/Mark A. Garlick
The team demonstrated how two large planets located in the protoplanetary disc can give rise to a smaller planet, wedged between them. They called this phenomenon the “sandwich formation of planets”.
Why this scenario? The two large home planets limit the inward flow of dust. This means that the quantity (Quantity is a generic term of metrology (count, amount); a scalar,…) of dust that accumulates between them is reduced compared to a situation (In geography, the situation is a spatial concept allowing the relative location of a…) without an outer planet. If this dust ends up forming a planet, then the middle planet would probably be smaller than the two outer planets, like the contents of a sandwich.
This theory might shed light on the formation of smaller planets like Mars and Uranus, which are each surrounded by larger planets. However, further research is needed in this area.
Associate Professor and Dorothy Hodgkin Scholar, Farzana Meru, from the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, said: “Over the last decade (A decade is equal to ten years. The term derives from the Latin words of decem “ten”…), observations (Observation is the action of attentive monitoring of phenomena, without the will to…) revealed that rings and gaps exist in protoplanetary disks. We propose in our study that these rings are sites of planet formation; more specifically, that there are currently sandwich planets forming in these rings.”
She adds: “The conventional view of planet formation, where they form sequentially from the inside out of the disk and become more and more massive as one moves away from the center, is challenged. What is also very interesting is that certain observations of exoplanets show this architecture (Architecture can be defined as the art of building buildings.) of a sandwich planet, where the middle planet is less massive ( The word massive can be used as 🙂 than its neighbors.”
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