A group of researchers located the ‘perfect solar system’ forged without the violent collisions that made ours a mixture of planets of different sizes. The system, located 100 light years away, has six planets, all approximately the same size. They have barely changed since their formation up to 12 billion years ago.
Perfect Solar System: Is There Life on Other Planets?
The undisturbed conditions of this perfect solar system make it ideal for learning how these worlds formed and whether they harbor life. The research has been published in the scientific journal Nature. It is important to note that the creation of our solar system was a violent process. As the planets formed, some collided with each other, disrupting orbits and leaving us with giants like Jupiter and Saturn alongside relatively small worlds like our own.
In the HD110067 system, as astronomers have rather dryly called it, things are very different because the planets are of a similar size and rotate completely synchronously. The time it takes the innermost planet to orbit the star three times, the next planet orbits the star twice, and so on until the fourth planet in the system. From there, things change to a 4:3 relative orbit speed pattern for the last two planets.
Over the past thirty years, astronomers have discovered thousands of star systems, but none are as suitable for studying how planets formed. The nearly identical size of the planets and the unaltered nature of the solar system are tremendous factors for astronomers, making it much easier to compare and contrast between them.
This story was written in Spanish by Miguel Fernandez in Cultura Colectiva News
