dc.description.abstract |
Right from dawn of the civilization, human’s quest for understanding the genesis of solar system
formation remains elusive. There are many unanswered questions; to cite few:
(i) How sun and solar system is formed?
(ii) Why most of mass is concentrated in the central sun, whereas most of angular
momentum is concentrated in the planets?
(iii) How terrestrial planets like Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth and gaseous giants like
Jupiter are formed?
Although it is too simplistic and naive, nebular hypothesis of solar system formation (as
proposed by Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant, and Pierre-Simon Laplace) doesn't explains
many of these intriguing observations of solar system, especially why most of the total mass due
to terrestrial planets in sun's vicinity is less compared to total mass of the gaseous giant planets
like Jupiter. Can we find further clues from elsewhere in the external solar system in the distant
universe? Infact, with sophisticated telescopic observations from space, recent years heralded
discovery of many exoplanets that revolutionized our understanding of solar system formation. It
is interesting to be noted that, in contrast to our solar system, where very low mass planets are
orbiting in the vicinity of the sun, most of the recently discovered exoplanets in the universe
have masses equal to or greater than Jupiter's masses and are orbiting very close to their host
stars. In order to understand this nature's dilemma, we consider masses of sun like G type stars
and the exoplanets in their vicinity with the following constraints on properties of exoplanets:
(i) Having orbital near zero eccentricity,
(ii) Orbiting with in 1 AU from the host stars and,
(iii) Orbital inclination less than 80 degrees.
With these constraints on the selection of data and after mass loss corrections for both the host
stars and their respective planets, we find a universal inverse mass relationship such that "high
mass host stars have low mass planets in their vicinity and vice-verse". |
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