Gliese 436 b
Gliese 436 b is a Neptune-sized planet orbiting a red dwarf star. The planet orbits so close to its star that the planet's temperature is estimated to be 439 degrees Centigrade. But scientists estimate that most of the planet is solid water – some kind of weird solid water that doesn't melt even at very high temperatures.
Scientists also say the planet has more carbon monoxide than it should have. The biggest mystery about the planet, however, is that it apparently has about 7000 times less methane than it should, according to models of planetary formation.
The Pisces Puzzler
GU
Piscium b (also known as GU Psc b) is a planet that orbits its star
at a distance of 2000 times the distance between the Earth and the
Sun. By comparison, in our solar system the dwarf planet Pluto
orbits at a distance of about 32 times the distance between the Earth
and the Sun.
Scientists
are baffled by how such a planet could have formed. The prevailing
model of planetary formation holds that planets and a star form from
a single disk of gas and dust. It's hard to imagine such a disk
originally extending 2000 times the distance between the Earth and
the Sun. The planet GU Piscium b takes about 163,000 years to orbit
its star.
Kepler
10c is a recently discovered planet that has 2.3 times the Earth's
radius, and about 17 times the Earth's mass. According to planetary
formation models, a planet with that mass and radius should be a
gaseous planet similar to Neptune. But scientists say that Kepler 10c
is actually a rocky planet – a super-Earth bigger than the maximum
size of a rocky planet, according to previous scientific estimates.
Scientists had a previous notion of the “most massive super-Earth
possible,” but Kepler 10c is a super-Earth much bigger than that.
My guess about what it looks like on Kepler 10C
TrES-4
is a planet about 1.7 times the size of Jupiter. “TrES-4 is way
bigger than it's supposed to be," says scientist Georgi
Mandushev. "For its mass, it should be much smaller. It
basically should be about the size of Jupiter and instead it's almost
twice as big."
Kepler
78b
Kepler-78b
is a planet orbiting the star Kepler 78, a G-class star like the sun,
located about 400 light-years away. The strangest thing about the
planet is the location of its orbit. The planet orbits its star at a
distance of about 900,000 miles, which is about the diameter of the
sun and other G-class stars. This is an orbit which places the
planet more than 30 times closer to its sun than the planet Mercury
is to our sun. The planet is so close to its star that it must be a
kind of lava world too hot for life.
Earth?
That's
all for my list of the five most inexplicable planets, but perhaps I
should add a sixth: our own planet Earth. For this is the planet
where there has occurred two all-but-inexplicable things we have
never witnessed on any other planet: the origin of life and the
origin of advanced consciousness.
As discussed here, the
origin of life seems nearly inexplicable because a very high degree of
sophistication must be reached before any Darwinian biological
evolution can begin. You apparently need a genetic code and
self-replicating molecules before any biological evolution can occur,
but how could those have appeared? Scientists are trying to create
models of “chemical evolution” to bridge this gap, but it's not
at all clear that the concept of evolution can be carried over in an
adequate and meaningful way from the world of biology to the world of
chemistry.
The
origin of advanced consciousness seems nearly inexplicable because
humans have so many subtle mental abilities that are hard to explain
by evoking natural selection: things such as spirituality, aesthetic
appreciation, language abilities, moral impulses, math abilities,
philosophical abilities and so forth. Quite a few of these are
abilities or traits that have no obvious benefit in allowing a human
to survive until reproduction, and they therefore seem to be things
that are very hard to account for under any explanation of natural
selection in the “survival of the fittest” sense, as I discuss here. This does not
suggest that evolution doesn't occur, but may suggest that it can't
explain everything about the human mind.
We
might say, therefore, that none of the astonishing things discovered
on other planets is as astonishing as what we know has happened on
our own planet.
My
own view is that the known laws of nature and features of nature are
probably inadequate to explain the appearance of life (and particularly
intelligent life) on our planet, and that we may need to postulate
the existence of additional undiscovered features of nature that
could help account for such phenomena. See other posts on this blog (for example, this one) for my thoughts on this topic.
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