- #1
timken
- 5
- 0
I have a question that someone out there might be able to help me with. We have currently detected around 140 extra solar planets, but most of these systems are a bit weird with gas giants orbiting close to their stars.
It’s fairly obvious that we are finding these systems first because they are the only ones detectable by our current methods. I believe we are close to being able to detect more “sensible” systems like our own with gas giants orbiting in Jupiter like periods, but we are not quite there yet.
In the absence of any cataclysmic event such as the influence of a binary companion, the gas cloud left over after star formation must surely form planets. After all, there must be gas left over when a star forms, and it isn’t just going to sit there for billions of years doing nothing. So if we assume that all single stars have planets, can we assume that those that we have looked at to date which have shown no evidence of planetary perturbations might have planetary systems more like ours.
So my question is how many stars have been looked at to yield the current 140+ extra solar planets. It would be nice if 95% of the stars studied so far have shown no evidence of associated planets.
It’s fairly obvious that we are finding these systems first because they are the only ones detectable by our current methods. I believe we are close to being able to detect more “sensible” systems like our own with gas giants orbiting in Jupiter like periods, but we are not quite there yet.
In the absence of any cataclysmic event such as the influence of a binary companion, the gas cloud left over after star formation must surely form planets. After all, there must be gas left over when a star forms, and it isn’t just going to sit there for billions of years doing nothing. So if we assume that all single stars have planets, can we assume that those that we have looked at to date which have shown no evidence of planetary perturbations might have planetary systems more like ours.
So my question is how many stars have been looked at to yield the current 140+ extra solar planets. It would be nice if 95% of the stars studied so far have shown no evidence of associated planets.