Kepler-36's 'Odd Couple' Defy Planet Formation Theories

astroengine writes "The two planets circling Kepler-36, a sun-like star in its senior years, are as different as Earth and Neptune. But unlike the hundreds of millions of miles that separate our solar system's rocky worlds from its gas giants, Kepler-36's brood come as close as 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers, or 0.01 AU) from one another — about five times the distance between Earth and the moon. This is yet another weird exoplanetary star system that defies conventional wisdom when it comes to planetary formation theories. 'The weirder they are, the more scientifically interesting they are,' Steve Howell, deputy project scientist with NASA's Kepler space telescope, told Discovery News."

Comments

Re:I expect the reality of exoplanets to often be

[oodaloop]

Try to picture the implications, for example, of a tidally-locked hot super-earth. You can readily have a habitable-temperature cold side while the other side is hot enough to boil the surface off to plasma.

It was a dark and stormy night. The lead sulfide rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of ammonia wind which swept up the alien canals. In other words, a typical day on the dark side of Omicron 1.

Re:I expect the reality of exoplanets to often be

[oodaloop]

Are you kidding me? This is some of my best alien noir, or xenoir as I like to call it. Things really start to pick up in chapter two, where our hero is confronted by time-travelling ninja robots. But don't worry, he gets the hive queen in the end.