IF planets form the same way, from the same material, shouldn't they be the same?
So wouldn't planetary diversity undermine the evolutionary view of the cosmos?
"“We are finding an absolutely enormous range of planet types. It has come as quite a surprise,” said William Borucki of Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in Moffat Field, California, the principal investigator on the Kepler Mission to find habitable planets beyond our Solar System.
Among them is one that resembles Tatooine. Kepler-16b, has two suns setting over the horizon instead of just one but in this case it has not thought to be habitable.
“We are beginning to find planetary systems with more than one planet orbiting a star, and so far they are
all rather different to our own Solar System,” Dr Borucki said.
While some planets are as dense as iron, with oceans of molten metal, others appear to be feather-light heavenly bodies composed of gaseous or rarefied material, he said.
“We have found a planet with the density of Styrofoam. It would float in the ocean, in fact, with most of it sticking out of the water.
“We are finding planets that are just a little bigger than Earth but with the density of iron. It is orbiting very close to its star, with an orbiting time of less than one day. It is so hot it must be molten, so it must have oceans of lava or possibly molten iron,” he said.
Some planets have turned out to be nearly as small as the Moon, while others are several times the size of Jupiter – the biggest planet in the Solar System – which has defied conventional logic of how planet’s form, Dr Borucki said.
“We are finding planets bigger than Jupiter, which is a surprise in that it was believed that planets could not be larger than Jupiter because if you add mass to a planet we thought it would just get denser, not bigger,” Dr Borucki.
Some planets are orbiting their stars together, which theory suggests would demand that they have similar densities. But scientists have found two closely-orbiting planets with very different densities – one is made of rock while the other is composed of gas.
Even the orbits of the exoplanets have proven to be unconventional. Before Kepler, most planetary scientists thought that rocky planets like Earth would orbit close to their star, while gaseous planets such as Jupiter would orbit further out – but large gas planets have been found in very close orbits to their stars." The Independent
Through faith we understand
that the worlds were framed by the word of God,
Hebrews 11:3