Rundown 5 — “Impossible” exoplanet system (inside-out structure)

1:06:35discovered a solar system that should not be possible. Four planets orbiting a red dwarf. Yep. uh 116 light years away from Earth. >> So what is happening here and why should this solar system not be possible? >> Right? So we used to think that every solar system should kind of look like ours for very good reasons. The way it looks like ours is the inner planets are rocky, the outer planets are gas giants, right? That makes sense because when um solar systems form, the star is going to be very volatile. So, it's going to the radiation from that protoar is going to basically shoe away all of these lighter elements like helium and hydrogen and ice and things like that. The rocky

1:07:17elements like iron and other nickel that's going to stick around the star and create rocky planets. And then the outside is going to be gas giants. That's how our solar system is. The physics makes sense. >> Yes, >> they have found an inside out solar system. This solar system goes rocky, gas giant, gas giant, rocky. Oh, >> and that really doesn't make sense. >> Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. >> Okay, just from the physics argument that I gave you. Yes. Right. And they're trying to figure out what the hell is going on, >> right? >> Okay. This um rocky planet that's on the outside is 1.7 times the mass of the Earth. It's what astronomers would call a super Earth. [clears throat] They tried to figure out like ways that it could have formed. Like suppose maybe it

1:07:58was a gas giant, but then the atmosphere got ripped apart, right? And so now we're seeing it as a rocky planet. They did a bunch of simulations. didn't work. Y >> so what they think is happening is that this outer rocky planet actually just formed later in the history >> because suppose the inner planets formed early. So you got the rocky planet on the inside. You got two gas giants. Those gas giants have hoarded >> all of the gas >> and now when this outside one formed there was no gas around to really like nucleate >> on the outside, right? And which is why it's now rocky. So, so the the the the idea, the hypothesis here is that there was it the difference is because of a time delay, a formation time delay. Yes,

1:08:40a formation time. >> They they started forming at different times and by the time that fourth planet started forming after the rocky gas giant gas giant, >> all of the materials to make it a gas giant were not available and so it became a rocky Exactly. rocky planet. >> Yeah. >> This is a good one. Out of University of Warwick, University of Michigan Ann Arbor plus several others in science. Yeah. >> Uh we went long on the rundown today, but we love this stuff. So sometimes we get >> sometimes we get Yeah. Sometimes >> sometimes we get a little carried away. Uh we'll try to keep it tighter, but we