Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Author:Donald Goldsmith
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780674976900
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-09-10T06:00:00+00:00

The exoplanet expert David Kipping has pointed to an interesting aspect of the newly established super-Earth category: our planet’s rank among the largest of these objects. As Kipping puts it:

The emerging evidence for a divide between rocky planets and gaseous planets at [about]1.5 Earth radii was quite surprising and generally everyone expected this divide to occur at more like 2 Earth radii. That might sound like a small difference, but it corresponds a quite a large difference when translated into mass.… In fact there is compelling evidence that the dividing line may even be closer to 1.2–1.3 Earth radii. What this means is that the Earth may actually represent one the largest rocky planets in the universe; in other words, we may be a Super-Earth all along. This kind of makes sense … [because] we would generally expect to live on [one] of the largest [rocky] planets since it supports a larger population.4

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