Protoplanetary Disks Are Smaller Than Expected

Protoplanetary Disks Are Smaller Than Expected In astronomy, the first thing you see may be the least typical. A case in point: ‘Hot Jupiters.’ A few prescient souls, among them Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes in their novel Encounter with Tiber, speculated about gas giants that survived incredibly tight orbits around their star, and when asked about this in the 1990s, Greg Matloff ran the numbers and confirmed to his surprise that there was a theoretical case for their existence. Let me quote Matloff on this: Although I was initially very skeptical since then-standard models of solar system formation seemed to rule out such a possibility, I searched through the literature and located the appropriate equation (Jastrow and Rasool, 1965)….To my amazement, Buzz was correct. The planet’s atmosphere is stable for billions of years. Since I was at the time working as a consultant and adjunct professor, I did not challenge the existing physical paradigm by submitting my results to a mainstream ... Read full article.