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‘Multiverse’ theory suggested by microwave background
The idea that other universes — as well as our own — lie within “bubbles” of space and time has received a boost.
Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these “bubble universes” may have left marks on our own.
This “multiverse” idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by. The preliminary work, to be published in Physical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.
In our Solar System, planets fall into two types. First, there are the rocky planets like Earth, Mars, and Venus, which are similar in size and support gaseous atmospheres. Then there are the gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. These huge puff balls are two or more orders of magnitude bigger than their rocky cousins.
Perhaps strangest of all, there are no planets in between; nothing that sits on the borderline between rocky minnow and gas giant.
This sharp distinction has driven much of astronomers’ thinking about planet formation. One of the main challenges they have faced is to come up with a theory that explains the formation of two entirely different types of planet, but no hybrids that share characteristics of both.
That thinking will have to change. It now looks as if we’ve been fooled by our own Solar System. When astronomers look elsewhere, this two-tiered planetary division disappears.
Astrophysicists have now spotted more than 500 planets orbiting other stars and all of these systems seem entirely different to our Solar System. They’ve seen entirely new class of planets such as the Super-Jupiters that are many times larger than our biggest planet with orbits closer than Mercury.
But the one we’re interested in here has a mass that spans the range from Earth to Uranus, exactly the range that is missing from our Solar System.
Astronomers are calling these new types of planet Super-Earths, and so far they have found more than 30 of them.
