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RIP Physics?

newtonsm.jpgAnother day, another new exoplanet acting funny and inspiring headlines that portend the death of physics. This week in Nature, astronomers reported a pretty cool find: WASP-18b is 10 times the mass of Jupiter, 50 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun, and whizzes around its star in less than a day. So how can something so big dart around so close to its star?

There are a few explanations: A) the planet might have been caught “moments” (about a million years) before its plasmatic death; B) the star WASP-18 may exert weaker tidal forces than we’d expect; or C) we need to rewrite the laws of physics.

How about…C? Both the LA Times print edition and the Independent declare that the planet “Defies the Laws of Physics” (the Times’ website has a more toned-down version, describing the situation as a “puzzle”), and Scientific American claims the planet “”https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=new-exoplanet-shouldnt-exist-09-08-27">Shouldn’t Exist", though to be fair, so did the Nature press release.

On a more scientific note, scenario A seems more likely than B, and a number of news stories provide a fair breakdown of the two (AP, Science, National Geographic). Option B is more tantalizing, and some articles quote the paper’s accompanying perspective, where astronomer Douglas Hamilton noted that the odds of discovering a planet at the brink of death was “only about 1 in 1,000”. But that really doesn’t seem like too long a shot, especially since atronomers have discovered almost 400 planets.

Even if B is true, that just means there’s more to learn about tidal interactions — not about the laws of physics.

Comments

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    Nicholas said:

    Am I the only one thinking Dr Who and “The Impossible Planet”?

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    V. said:

    My personal would be version A: After all, there are a lot of starts being looked at in search for planets. Some planets might be in stable orbits (like our Jupiter), and unstable ones would be in various stages of their respective lifes: some “young and kicking”, and some on the verge of the final plunge into the star. Number of stars that are being looked at I guess run in high thousands (maybe even millions); given that the life of a typical system is a few billion years, catching something that is in its final million years is not that unlikely. Re-writing laws of physics? I don’t think so. An opportuniny to write sensationalist article in some newspaper/magazine? Any day, please.

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    Eugene Sittampalam said:

    Physics is dead. Long live physics!

    Here, we have only got our picture of planetary system formation in reverse. (In fact, it is bottom-up when it should be top-down!) But, first, please see Nature 438, 332-334 (2005), or How do stars form? by Belle Dumé, PhysicsWeb, 16 November 2005, where Princeton and Berkeley experts admit a fatal flaw in our current wisdom of the formation process. “Our result is that the bottom-up idea doesn’t work… Instead, stars form by fragmentation, and the fragmentation process determines their masses.”

    And a planetary system is basically a collection of stellar fragments in a disc around the forming star. This is the orbital disc, or potential well, in which the debris, from dust to the largest chunks of nuclear stellar material that failed star billing, aggregate. A planet is thus generally a star that has cooled off rapidly due to its insufficient size and lack of a backpressure for nuclear fusion at the core from the primary nuclear fission of its material (akin to a failed H-bomb). For more, please visit the illustrative site: http://www.sittampalam.net/TheSunII.htm.

    Large planets like Jupiter, or WASP-18b here, can also form subsequently from highly asymmetric nova-like upheavals of the young and active central star. The very close proximity of WASP-18b to its parent star supports this picture of celestial mechanics; and kindly note that the planet here may well be spiralling not in but OUT – as future observations can confirm! (Though fall back following ejection cannot be ruled out, only two dead bodies like binary neutron stars can spiral IN due to their diminishing counter-gravitational radiation.)

    Cheers!

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