Giant Planets 'Formed In Hundreds Of Years'

Giant planets like Jupiter were formed in just a few hundred years, not several million as was previously thought, according to scientists.

The research completely contradicts the widely held assumption that it takes at least one million years for gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn to evolve.

Two years of work by scientists using a greatly refined mathematical model produced results that they say explain just how quickly such planets form.

Astrophysicist Thomas Quinn, from the University of Washington, said the disk of matter which spins round a young star begins to break up and congeal into planets more quickly than earlier thought.

The gravity of the resulting clusters of matter pulls in surrounding gas that makes up the vapour shrouds around giant planets like Jupiter, he told the journal Science.

"If a gas giant planet can't form quickly, it probably won't form at all," he said.

Scientists believe gas giants to be quite common, after finding evidence for about 100 planets of up to 10 times the size of Jupiter around other stars.

According to the research, the new mathematical model also explains why Uranus and Neptune do not have gas "envelopes".

The research team argued that when these more distant planets were formed, the solar system was still part of a star cluster and other nearby stars moved away, causing whatever gas the planets had to disperse.

I thought your primary interest was the un-name-able Planet Seven.

Well, truth be known my primary interest is in threads about vibrating stimulation devices, but there's only so much you can say about that subject and not get arrested for public indecency.

So I bide my time on science-releated threads until another juicy "D*ldo Madness" thread pops up.....

"There otta be a law that every article like this declares just like the writing on a cigarette pack that the findings of the authors are their best guesses based on the knowledge at hand and that it is just a good damn guess."

Well, friend, it is assumed that science progresses from best guesses based on knowledge at hand, being as to how that is the way it works. Luckily, science does not claim to be ungrounded 'found' knowledge such as one discovers in religious myth. Were it to be a priori, there wouldn't be anything left to learn, since all is known.

Don't know why this is significant.

Me neither. I do know it's useful to physicists. It helps pry loose the next NAS grant. It gets tenure. And invitations to conferences.

My brother is at the fore of this type of research, into planet formations. He's an expert on black holes, and he is interested in dust particles. Don't ask me. We don't talk about this stuff at dinner. Tonight over turkey, for example, the closest we got to serious phsyics was the story that when Farraday was asked what in his life he might do differently, could he choose, he replied, "I'd learn algebra."

That wasn't much consolation to a moron like me, but it's nice to know that one of our greatest scientist punted the x's and y's, too.

My brother has made a career of the Hubble, Las Alamos & Harvard labs, and that really big computer in California. Or so he tells me. He's pretty good at math, too, which means that he's taken many a bath on the stock market. While phsycists can't figure out the universe (hell, they're still trying for some "unified" theory -- I've got a dozen of those), they think they can manage the cumulative output of the millions motivated by greed, taking advice from brokers motivated by greed, and buying stocks inflated by greedy CFO's. I hope that when they get their "unified" theories together they can account for human nature.

Meanwhile, it's kinda cool to think that Jupiter was formed in a few hundred thousand years. Time, as I understand it, aint' what it seems. But it's been a long time since my brother last tried to explain the theory of relativity to me. I couldn't get past the fare of those trains. And I could never figure out which way the wind was blowing, even though the smoke from the electric train was heading south...

I dunno. You tell me. I ain't gonna ask my bro.

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