Well sorry not to have posted in here for a little while but I thought I'd let someone take a rest
The first of two posts, the second one is far shorter but just as enlightening.
Anyway, remember I said evidence is growing that our solar system is tending to uniqueness? No!? Then where have you been?
Ever heard of David Latham? No, neither had I! But, it turns out he has been asking the very same question. Well maybe not the very same question but unless you're a pedant, it amounts to the same thing.
"Two decades of searching have failed to turn up another planetary system like ours. Should we be worried?
IT WAS David Latham's misfortune that his email was time-stamped 1 April 1988. An astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was engaged in the then faintly disreputable task of searching for planets orbiting other stars. As he excitedly wrote to a colleague, he had found something: a body orbiting an ordinary yellow star, known only by its catalogue designation HD 114762, some 130 light years from Earth.
For Latham's peers, this was nothing more than an April Fool. If the object had been a planet, it would have gone against all we thought we knew about how planets - and indeed solar systems - could look.
Two decades on, planet-hunting is high fashion, and Latham has been vindicated. With hundreds of worlds known and more being discovered every week, planets and solar systems that break the rules are commonplace. In fact, they could well be the rule.
It's time to ask the question: is our solar system actually the odd one out?"
and
"In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland discovered a gas-giant planet with a mass similar to Jupiter's in a scorching four-day orbit around the sun-like star 51 Pegasi (Nature, vol 378, p 355). Within a year, Marcy and his colleague Paul Butler, both then at San Francisco State University in California, had confirmed that discovery, and also found two more "hot Jupiters". Later that year, they confirmed Latham's discovery as a planet.
It was clear we had ignored a fundamental rule of science. "We had been judging the cosmic diversity of planetary systems based on a sample size of one," says Marcy."
and there's more!
"If these were the
first hints that our solar system was not normal, they were not the last. Other planets were soon caught breaking all sorts of rules: orbiting in the opposite direction to their star's spin, coming packed in close orbits like sardines in a can, or revolving on wildly tilted orbits far away from their star's equator"
"All this makes the status of our solar system increasingly clear. "Our system is a rarity, there's no longer a question about that," says Marcy.
"The only question that remains is, just how rare is it?""Rest of the article
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028122.700-no-place-like-home-our-lonesome-solar-system.html? but you'll have to register to read it in full.
Goodness me, what a pleasant surprise to the usual dross of 'we havent search long \ hard \ far enough' of the galaxy yet. But, in a topic some people want to use 'sampling' to both support their argument and knock other down when it suits, it is a valid question. Not only that, but the evidence
is imo, pointing towards uniqueness.