4 ms·

Anyone care to speculate based on physics why this might have worked out this way?

• yonkshi 9y ago
  Indulge my wild guess (I'm not a physicist): If the proto solar system's matter distribution was a Gaussian-like distribution, it would make sense that matter density droped in a logarithmic scale, and thus planets formed droped logarithmically w.r.t radius. More intuitively.. further away from the sun has less probability for rocks/particles to interact with each other.
  • Someone 9y ago
    In our solar system, the small planets are closest to the sun. Jupiter, with 72% of all planetary mass, is more than twice as heavy as all other planets, combined. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune take most of the remaining 28% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_by_size#Graphical_overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_b...) (Of course, there also is way more volume that far away)
• clord 9y ago
  Another wild guess: a sphere of gas collapsed to a rotating disk. If you take a sphere and squash it flat, the middle has most of the mass, and it declines to zero as you get farther. I would guess the pattern of falloff of a squashed sphere is roughly logarithmic. That pattern gets quantized into planets, and so we see the original spherical distribution in our planets.
  • jacquesm 9y ago
    That makes a lot of sense.