Uncommon Earth...a new computer simulation... described in the Aug. 8 Science, is the first to trace from beginning to end how planetary systems form from an initial gas disk encircling a baby star. "The really striking result of the new model is how chaotic and even violent the average story of a planet's birth is," says Edward Thommes, an astrophysicist now at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. The process is typically a big mess. "Planets get into each others' 'personal space,' gravitationally scattering each other. They compete with each other for gas from the disk that gives birth to them and lots of planets are lost along the way," he says. "It's almost like reality TV." ... "An amount of gas in between those two is where there's a relatively narrow range where systems like ours are the end result," Thommes says. But, he cautions, although analogues to the solar system are less common, the team did still see a handful of them after 100 simulations. "Although we may be weird, we're by no means unique," he says.
by Ashley Yeager
August 30th, 2008