New answers tagged planetary-formation
7
In principle, yes. In practice, no.
The question has been studied for a long time. The classic treatment is Dyson's papers on "anchor rings" in 1893 (paper I, paper II) but it goes back to the study of "figures of equilibrium" starting with Newton's considerations of the oblateness of the Earth and then continuing with Maclaurin and ...
2
To add to LocalFluff's answer, the largest known clearly irregular body is the asteroid Juno (mean diameter: 246.6 km / 153.2 mi) in the main belt. However, celestial bodies can be spherical by chance, while far from hydrostatic equilibrium, like in case of Martian moon Phobos. A better way to distinguish asteroids from planets is by interior differentiation....
6
Prelude
It is now generally accepted in the planet formation community that planets form as a side-product of the star formation process in so-called protoplanetary discs.
Protoplanetary discs have initial masses of few to tens of percent of their stellar host masses, are relatively cold (T<150K in about 95% or more of their mass, which is outside the ...
41
There are a number of methods of detecting exoplanets, but all of them favour detection of larger planets over smaller ones, albeit for slightly different definitions of large:
Radial velocity measurement — this detects the small movement of the star towards and away from us as the planet and the star orbit their mutual barycenter. This movement is fastest ...
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