The case of the over-tilting exoplanets

Phys.org ^ | March 4, 2019, | Yale University

[BenLurkin]

For almost a decade, astronomers have tried to explain why so many pairs of planets outside our solar system have an odd configuration—their orbits seem to have been pushed apart by a powerful unknown mechanism. Yale researchers say they've found a possible answer, and it implies that the planets' poles are majorly tilted.

NASA's Kepler mission revealed that about 30% of stars similar to our Sun harbor "Super-Earths." Their sizes are somewhere between that of Earth and Neptune; they have nearly circular and coplanar orbits; and it takes them fewer than 100 days to go around their star. Yet curiously, a great number of these planets exist in pairs with orbits that lie just outside natural points of stability.

That's where obliquity—the amount of tilting between a planet's axis and its orbit—comes in, according to Yale astronomers Sarah Millholland and Gregory Laughlin.

"When planets such as these have large axial tilts, as opposed to little or no tilt, their tides are exceedingly more efficient at draining orbital energy into heat in the planets," said first author Millholland, a graduate student at Yale. "This vigorous tidal dissipation pries the orbits apart."

[motor_racer]

“Majorly”, really?

[earglasses]

Tom VanFlandern, the late, great astrophysicist, once posited the hypothesis that planetary systems are formed by blobs of matter being ejected in polar opposed pairs from the parent star.

[rfp1234]

Bigly.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin.

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[thoughtomator]

This is sci-fi, with an emphasis on “fiction”. They didn’t measure any axial tilts, this is a thought exercise to explain why (once again) observations don’t fit existing theory.

[YogicCowboy]

Agreed.

[Verginius Rufus]

The exoplanets are over-tilting because they have too many US military bases on them.

[David]

The Sumerian tablets have an explanation which actually fits both the physical configuration as well as other abnormal elements of our solar system.

Among other things, a planet like earth with one moon the size of our existing moon is unusual.

The tablet explanation is that there is another planet in the solar system with an orbital period of several thousand years which is several times the size of the earth which has had interaction with the outer planets over the course of history; one of its moons impacted the Earth in the present area of the Asteroid Belt resulting in the thin Earth crust in the Pacific and reducing the size of the planet significantly; and further resulting in the capture of the current Moon as proximate to the Earth.

Elijah Sithen’s “translation” of the tablets has the period of the tenth planet at 3500 +/- years however MIT scientists have developed a thesis that the actual period is between 4350 and 4400 years.

There is also a text out on Amazon which supports belief in God the ultimate creator as being the God responsible for the present condition, perhaps in part through the vehicle of interaction with a tenth planet.

[SunkenCiv]

Elijah Sithen? You mean Zecariah Sitchin? His entire corpus of work is rubbish.

[David]

Elijah Sithen? You mean Zecariah Sitchin? His entire corpus of work is rubbish.

Sorry, I miss typed--Yes I mean Zacariah.

But will all due respect, your view of his work is a little broader scope than fair.

The idea of "translating" all these hieroglyphics is misleading in the first place. He is demonstrably wrong on a number of important detail points (the 3500 year period being one of them).

But, that said, the planet has been visited on a regular basis over hundreds of thousands of years and maybe longer. The fundamental thesis of a specific group being the most recent is probably acceptable although they were not the only EBE's (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities) present at any given point in time.

The additional planet analysis seems to stand up--if more informed analysis turns out to be correct, we should see some real signs in the next thirty or forty years.

As a fundamental Christian, I have no difficulty in believing that God created a bunch of other huminoids in many different places; I see Jesus Christ as fairly separate from the EBE visitors--the historic record of who the players were and what the motivations of the actions were is confused. But Christ was real; and His message as enunciated in the Sermon on the Mount is God's description of righteous non sinful conduct.

[SunkenCiv]

Sitchin didn't have any idea what he was doing, his 'translations' were just made up. He was a fraud.

I concur about the possible visits to Earth by ETs/EBEs. And given the perceived crash rate of about once a century, in the 4.5 billion year existence of Earth, there may have been as many as 45 million UFO crashes. Kind of a lot, really. But any such critters didn't come from other planets in our Solar System, they've come a long, long way, from a lot of different places.

"To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow." -- Metrodorus, 4th c BC Greek philosopher

"Heaven and earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other earths." -- Teng Mu, 13th c AD Chinese philosopher