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My (totally uneducated) guess is, in the early formation of a solar system the material is hot and volatile it is all moving around a lot. There are a lot of la

My (totally uneducated) guess is, in the early formation of a solar system the material is hot and volatile it is all moving around a lot. There are a lot of large / medium sized bodies moving around they are running into each other, joining, breaking apart, moving around, etc. In all that chaos, the available material is tossed around and "excess" material is toss out of the inner planet orbit. I am imagining it like pouring a cup of sugar on a dinner plate and shaking the plate around until the amount of sugar on the plate is sort of stable. The excess material ends up outside the solar system (Oort cloud / kuiper belt) or part of gas giant cores and moons. With that, there is only so much material in the inner solar system to work with and the law of averages works out and we end up with similar sized planets. I would assert a hypothesis that a ratio of material in the inner solar system is linked, in some way, to the size of the star. That it is unlikely there will be massive earths out there in the inner solar system because of this natural distribution of material around a star. I have no formal training at all. Just an IT nerd that watches a lot of Kurzgesagt.

pault 7y ago
Sounds to me like putting sugar on a plate and vibrating it at a certain frequency. The same patterns always form for the same frequency. Why should solar systems be any different, given the overall mass of the star and raw material?
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Maybe more like shaking a plate of magnets around. Shake a little, they start to clump up. Shake long enough, there's only one large magnet stack. If the shake time follows a pattern, then most places will have similar planetary distribution e.g. few small planets and a couple of big ones?
PC_LOAD_LETTER 7y ago
That would be compelling if there were planets up to a certain size. However, that's not the case. You have increasingly large planets, a big gap, and then increasingly large planets again. It's a bimodal distribution, which implies some other factor at hand than just the law of averages.

pault 7y ago

Sounds to me like putting sugar on a plate and vibrating it at a certain frequency. The same patterns always form for the same frequency. Why should solar systems be any different, given the overall mass of the star and raw material?

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

Maybe more like shaking a plate of magnets around. Shake a little, they start to clump up. Shake long enough, there's only one large magnet stack. If the shake time follows a pattern, then most places will have similar planetary distribution e.g. few small planets and a couple of big ones?

PC_LOAD_LETTER 7y ago

That would be compelling if there were planets up to a certain size. However, that's not the case. You have increasingly large planets, a big gap, and then increasingly large planets again. It's a bimodal distribution, which implies some other factor at hand than just the law of averages.