Tuesday, January 08, 2002

DWARF FINDS SOL: Also on the astroscience front, a brown dwarf was found orbiting a sun much like our own by Michael Liu of the University of Hawaii. It was right where the planet-forming area is supposed to be. Its discovery raises some interesting conjecture:

Finding the brown dwarf so close to the star suggests that solar systems formed around sun-like stars could come in many different shapes and planetary distributions. Liu said it is possible that there are planets similar to Earth circling the star inside the orbit of the brown dwarf. For instance, it would be possible for a planet to orbit the star at 93 million miles, the distance from Earth to the sun.

Whatever way our own solar system evolved, it's not the only way for one to evolve, is what this discovery suggests. I wonder if this'll end up being more evidence for the rare Earth hypothesis.

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