Planet Formation Doesn't Have to be a Rush job After all

. It looks like that we’re just misunderstanding the data. Estimates of protoplanetary disk lifetimes typically come from observing as many systems as possible. But to get as many systems as possible you need to go very deep in your surveys to cover a large volume. But the deeper you go in your searches the more biased your observations become. You’re only able to measure theat those distances, and you tend to miss the smaller ones.

When the astronomers instead focused on lower mass stars and nearby protoplanetary disks, they found much longer lifetimes, more like 5 to 10 million years. This is more than enough time to build a planet like the Earth. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the planet formation process and how different kinds of planets can form around a single star. We also don’t fully understand how protoplanetary disks interact with their parent stars, but this is a major clue. It appears that if you want to build a planet around a massive star, you better act quick. But if you have a sun-like star, you’ve got plenty of time.

PaulMattSutter

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