Slashdot Mirror
Are Small Rocky Worlds Naked Gas Giants?
astroengine writes "The 'core accretion' model for planetary creation has been challenged (or, at least, modified) by a new theory from University of Leicester astrophysicists Seung-Hoon Cha and Sergei Nayakshin (abstract). Rather than small rocky worlds being built 'bottom-up' (i.e. the size of a planet depends on the amount of material available), perhaps they were once the cores of massive gas giant planets that had their thick atmospheres stripped after drifting too close to their parent stars? This 'top-down' mechanism may also help explain how smaller worlds were formed far from their stars only to drift inward toward the habitable zone."
For fuck's sake. Occasionally I see an interesting thread like this, but despair that the first 50 comments are always a bunch of unfunny jokes. Fuck. Stop it. It's not funny.
Any sensible reply gets buried by crap like this. "Haha, gas and smells" "Hahah, cow tipping", "Hahah, your momma", "Hahah, gas giant", "Hahaha, your crust is showing".
Look, none of those replies were witty. They were, at best, stupid. I used to come to Slashdot to actually find more detail about the science behind the article, but now it just puts me off even reading.