New work suggests four distinct star system types—and finds our own in the rarest category
A planetary system is shaped at the boundary of order and chaos. It starts out as a molecular cloud—a big, cold clump of mostly hydrogen gas that can collapse to make stars. As central stars form, the remainder of the cloud flattens into a whirling protoplanetary disk that weaves together worlds from turbulent swirls of gas, ice and dust. From there larger-scale chaos can ensue as bigger planets push smaller ones around.
Scientists had long thought our own solar system—an “ordered” arrangement of tiny orbs closer to the sun and big ones farther out—was a typical outcome of this complex process. But NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission revealed that most systems don't resemble our own at all, instead having “similar” configurations of closely packed worlds all nearly the same size and mass, like peas in a pod.
This disparity inspired astrophysicists Lokesh Mishra, now at IBM, Yann Alibert of the University of Bern and their colleagues to investigate what other architectures might exist. This is a formidable task for modern telescopes but a question that computer models can easily explore.
Crucially, this research introduces a new mathematical framework for quantifying similarities among a system's planets according to any observable characteristic, such as mass or size; one number reveals the total range of values for that characteristic among the planets, and the other reflects how widely those values typically vary from planet to planet.
University of Chicago astrophysicist Daniel Fabrycky, who was not involved with the new research, says such upcoming observations make these kinds of studies especially valuable. “This is about building some set of concepts, around which we expect to be able to make interesting conclusions in the future,” he says.
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