Planets May Form in Hundreds, Not Millions, of Years

Seanasy writes "Recent simulations on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Terascale Computing System suggest that planet formation may take a lot less time than previously thought. The results were published in SCIENCE."

Comments

Velikovsky (and James P. Hogan) would be pleased!

[TrebleJunkie]

Wow. And to think that Velikovsky was just about run out of the scientific community 50 years ago for putting forth a similar idea, among others -- that planets could form rather quickly, in years or hundreds of years, rather than the millions of years previously thought.

This is also sort of the subject of James P. Hogan's novel, Cradle of Saturn. If you've never read James P. Hogan, you should. Good, good stuff.

Re:This isn't at all surprising

[MacAndrew]

Unremarkably, you miss that the study suggests the gas giants formed quickly not recently.

6,000 years is a lot more reasonable-sounding ... why? A staggering amount of evidence point towards a time period much, much longer. "Reasonable" is believing things in reasonable accord with the evidence, and the estimate need never be completely proved to be accepted as fact. That's just not how people do things in real life.

Evolution, for that matter, is a fact under the same principle of overwhelming evidence. The debate or theory now centers on how it happened, which might be Darwin's theory or something else; if Darwin is disproved the fact of evolution will remain. You are free to believe otherwise, but won't change the real world any more than your refusal to believe in the fact of gravity will enable you to fly.

Is this disrespectful? Yes. I think it would be untenable to grant any belief a held by any person person with equal weight. I thought creationism, with its tenuous basis in the Bible, had been left by the wayside long ago, though I realize there will always be a core that will believe anything.

Understanding the "hot Jupiters"

[Drog]

For anyone interested in more details, this story appeared here a week ago. An interesting comment pointed out that this theory has major implications in understanding the hundred or so "hot Jupiters" that have been found around other stars. Most have orbital periods of only a few days and orbit their star at a distance less than Mercury's. This new theory may suggest that hot Jupiters are actually newly-formed gas planets and perhaps even a transient phenomena.