Startling Discovery by NASA’s Kepler Telescope

[Valin]

PJ Media

Rick Moran

8/29/12

 

Every once and a while, a discovery is made that throws previous theories into a cocked hat and sends scientists scurrying back to the blackboard to try and explain the new information and tell us what it means.

 

NASA’s Kepler Telescope has made such a discovery and our theories of how planets form will never be the same.

 

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The reason that this discovery is causing such excitement in the planetary science community is that Kepler 47-B and 47-C defy current theories that tell us how planets form. The standard model for stars like our sun is that a ring of gas and dust called an accretion disk orbits the young star and inside that ring, grains of dust are attracted to each other, gradually forming larger and larger bodies until planet size balls emerge.

 

But a circumbinary system was thought to be too unstable an environment for the dust to eventually form into planets. The likelihood that one of the stars would act like a bowling ball, careening through the accretion disk scattering any nascent planetary bodies thus not allowing the planets to coalesce makes the Kepler discovery something of a mystery:

 

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