Tuesday, November 18, 2008

A follow-up to the post from Friday about the new images of extra-solar planets:  a new paper coming out today searched for additional massive planets around Fomalhaut (the one with the planet at ~100 AU) and didn't find any between 15 AU and 40 AU (remember, an AU is an Earth-Sun distance).  The upper limit on mass is 2x that of Jupiter, so the search wasn't that sensitive (our whole Solar System would be undetectable), but it does at least tell us that the system isn't just an incredibly massive freak of nature.  So we're still left with the problem of how a massive planet (0.5 MJup or larger) would form at 100 AU in a normal planetary system.  More to come... 

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